It still feels like I'm flying.
All the colors folded in upon themselves, growing sharper and sharper points until their sight sliced me to shreds. I know how this started, but I have no idea what it is now, or where it’s going. A feminine voice was telling me to relax, but now it’s just a slow, demonic static sound.
Knives. Slicing. Cutting. Two inches apart. Two feet. Two yards. Two planets. Cut, cut, cut. Slice, slice, slice. Flayed bits of my skin lay splattered across the ground. Others float. Others have dug their way to the center of the earth.
I thought it was just a piece of candy. I thought the restraints were for sex. I thought a lot of things.
A floating bone swims by on the crimson river. Is it mine? Where did it come from? It feels like I’m being torn to pieces all over. Touch, the hardest sense to trick, the usual indicator, has abandoned me.
There are four of them now, standing around me. I can’t process how many hands they each have, but each hand grips a utensil made for cutting, for slicing. The ends of the tools are dancing through the beginnings of me. They’re why pink ribbons peel from my ends. They’re why the burgundy fountain runs pure over the Idol. Cascades, waterfalls. Shedding my peel. Shedding the shell. Molting. A chunk running from my elbow to my wrist is swiftly removed. It falls and the puddle splashes.
I can’t stop giggling. It looks like a fish falling out of a tank and landing with a splat. I can see the bone in my arm now, split into several directions, twisting and burning and forming a star symbol. It’s a symbol I’ve seen before, but I don’t remember what it means. Who knows if it’s actually there or if it’s just whatever I’m on kicking in?
The giggling accelerates to cackling. I watch my lungs bounce with each rise and fall of my diaphragm, sticking through the makeshift flaps in my chest like a tissue peeking out from the top of its cardboard box slash dispenser. It’s hilarious. I wonder if I breathe in enough, if they’ll pop like a balloon? I want desperately to try, but I can’t stop laughing to do it.
Venomous baby serpents climb my flayed legs, plaid and spiral patterns carved in them, following the gaping wounds like slot cars on a track. Forceps tear my urethra open as a particularly small one climbs inside. This pain is extreme enough that I can distinguish it, but in my heightened sense of awareness, the sound is what strikes me. A sound like paper tearing, and then one like a caterpillar eating through a leaf. It comes out of one of my eye sockets and becomes a knife, falling to the floor and floating away. Floating, floating, floating, gently down the red river, past the Idol, past the cutters, past the planets.
Everything spins gently. I realize I’m not on the floor but the ceiling. We all are. There never was a floor. We’re all flying in reverse. The atoms between our feet and the ground never fully touch. It’s invisible flight. We are all levitators. Only the blood can caress the intricate grooves of the mahogany floorboards. It is a privilege for our parts, not our sum.
I’m finally able to crawl out. Wrists are snapped twigs, hands caught in the snags of metal cuffs but arms now free to flounder and spurt. Skin, bones, flesh split and hiss and bubble and ooze as I fall with a splat. I’m able to feel the grooves myself, now. I sink into them, tasting the red, swimming in it. I never knew a color could feel so good. So pure. I drink it and it becomes me. I glance into the reflection, and the room is empty.
I was the Idol all along.
Some wounds never heal. I know what sent me into the mental breakdown that caused me to write the piece above, but I don't pretend to know what it means. It's stream of subconsciousness writing--I'm sure if I decipher it, it's the purest window to my soul and pain possible. Perhaps in time I'll come to understand it. Have you ever loved something so much you'd rather die than lose it and then have it taken away from you and be too coward to die? Some would call that strength. I've been told it is. I don't know what to believe. The people who tell me that I'm strong to get over my betrayal and trauma and lower my guard and love and trust fully and wholly are the same people who I need those walls to keep out to begin with. Never give more of your heart than you're willing to lose, permanantly. If you love with your whole heart, prepare to have your whole heart ripped out, and don't think it won't happen to you. Don't think that just because you're years into a relationship where you've given up your whole heart and soul, that the day won't come when it's torn out anyway with zero warning. You'll have it all figured out, find your reason to live, the one thing that keeps you going, and you'll watch it wither and die in front of you with no hope of revival and at no fault of your own. And when that happens, when your reason for living dies, you'll have a choice to make. The only thing you're in control of is how much you love yourself, and whether or not you decide to continue living without it and struggle to find new meaning. I encourage you to keep going, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't struggled with it myself. I can tell you that as long as I live, I won't love again. Not fully, not for real. Not a trusting, deep love. Listen well, friend. Nobody will ever love you with their whole heart except yourself. You'll think you've found the one other pure soul who loves you just as much back, but you will be wrong, and you will pay the consequences of your folly. Smile, put on a show yourself, say you love them, but never, never give up your entire heart. Never love selflessly. Nobody will ever love you more than they love themselves. They'll tell you that they were never in love with you and walk out the door while you realize your heart, future and soul are leaving with them and will never come back. People will call them brave, and encourage them, and tell you how very sorry they are but how that's just how it had to be and to tell them if you need anything, and you'll know what you need, but it's not something anyone can give you back. You want your heart and soul back. You want the ability to love and trust back. But it'll be as dead as your hopes and dreams and will to live, friend. And when that happens to you, maybe you'll be able to decipher this piece, just like I hope to be able to when I stop having panic attacks for long enough to think straight and process it. I haven't slept more than 5 hours in days and it's 4 AM right now again with no end in sight.
I will drink the wine while it is warm and never let you catch me looking at the sun, and after all the loves of my life, you'll still be the one. I will take my life into my hands and I will use it. I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it. I will have the things that I desire, and my passion flow like rivers to the skies. But after the loves of my life, oh, after all the loves of my life, I'll be thinking of you... and wondering why. Macarthur Park is melting in the dark all the sweet green icing flowing down someone left the cake out in the rain i don't think that i can take it cause it took so long to bkake it nd i'll never have the recipeie again oh no oh no... no