Tonight is one of those nights where the nightmares are real and they just won’t stop. Where if I could bring myself to touch someone I might just want that contact. Not even the person I am currently staying with sees that I flinch away when they get too close, I haven’t looked in a mirror for years, and I don’t seem to sleep anymore. I know after seven days my fingernails will get brittle, my skin and hair will dull, and my body will begin to break down. I look at this clinically because I can no longer feel anything – the well meaning ones took care of that.
I realize in a detached way that there is something like broken glass inside me, churning around as I move. I am almost afraid that when I cough beautiful red will stain my lips and I will know that the glass is real and not something I imagined. It will bubble up and spill over looking for all the world like an over filled glass. Pouring down in the restless tide desperate to overtake ground. Just as real as the red that pours out of a thousand tiny cuts so carefully hidden from the world. Its stunning in its own way and there are people who can see that for the tragically beautiful sight it is. The same way someone looks after everything else is done and the only thing left that they can do is cry because of its loss. There is purity in that sight unlike anything that people normally feel or witness. Just as there is purity in inflicting and receiving pain.
No one notices that the nightmares leave me screaming or that my heart beats too hard against the razor shoved carelessly and deep within it. I am surprised no one hears me break, slowly, so slowly over time.
I am waiting for the hallucinations to start. A nifty side effect that even the most hardcore drug addict would envy if they weren’t so real and so inescapable. Then they will come with their solutions, their quaint notions, and their tired cliches. Eventually they will say every thing will be alright except that it never is because they can’t see what I see. They don’t know what I know.
The blackouts have already started… some long purged defense mechanism gone haywire. Making me forget entire blocks of time because it can’t protect me from itself so it tries to protect me from everything else, even the things I don’t need protection from. Now I can’t even escape into my own world, I can just watch from afar wondering what the architects have planned.
It won’t let me rest. The cycle has gone one long enough for me to be wary of closing my eyes wondering what I will see when I do. I see it but I can’t feel it anymore and I can’t decide which is worse.
