For SJK: On the Void

I have so many feelings, I sometimes feel them physically manifest, as though my bones are stronger, because the mettle of them is made in hell’s steel mill; has felt those fires, was moulded and bent and twisted into this very shape by them, too. And these words that come out, that so often are wrong and dark and unhappy, are all an exhalation of that kind of smoke. Sometimes I feel oppressed by this body. I have never been able to escape it. I want to tell you to be weary, not to take those drugs, because it is a never-ending spiral of wanting and numbness and forgetting what you were, and the things that made you special. Other people might step in and try to make lists on your behalf, but you won’t believe them, because you will know the truth. And if you let them have your life, you will know that you took more pills than they care to count, that you swallowed electric and violent chemicals that took you down spark by spark. And sometimes, when it’s just you and the sputtering furnace, you descend so dark, you find yourself deep in the slums of that memory. I want to tell you to tell someone, while the wound is fresh, before you have filled it with tar, with salt, with hate, with shame, with anything black enough to make you think it goes away. The trick is to let it bleed out, before it wraps around your heart like ivy. Before it makes your breath a shadow. Before it makes your tears fall backwards into your eyes because you know there isn’t a single damn point in crying, and anyway, that never hurts enough. Before you find yourself, a grown ass woman, on the ground with a paring knife, wild and alone, hoping you can still get off your own fucking pain. If there’s one thing I would tell you, it’s to stay gentle. You can do this by crying a lot, and by listening hard. It isn’t ever the balance they give you that helps. It is only yourself.  Just remember to ask for prescriptions to that – to yourself.