Stress

It's all getting too much. I feel like there's a woman sitting on my chest. She's not slight in stature or doing it playfully, this isn't foreplay on a Sunday morning - she's obese and she's pinning me down with her meaty knees, her pudgy fingers wrapped possessively around my heart. And she's squeezing. Squeezing like my organ is a stress ball and she's a smoker two days into a begrudging bid to quit. I wish her chest was open, rib cage spread like legs in a brothel, so I could reach in and grab her innards; repay the courtesy. Maybe then the feeling would fade, she'd readjust her stance, relieving me for a brief euphoric moment. 

But she's set on her position, and with each passing second, each day's meals, her weight increases. I can feel myself snapping under it. Breaking slowly around the edges, creaking quietly further to finality. What relief that would be to fall into darkness, to be welcomed into the vacuous entirety of death. Free of the burden of tactile experience. But this woman is selfish, she's relentless and she's cruel. I think once I snap she'll keep my heart beating, crushing rhythmically just enough that I survive. I'll have fragmented bones protruding through my skin but she won't notice through her gluttonous rage. Too fed by the calm I give her. Then I'll be forced to keep on living, not quite sure of what I am. Of that I am terrified. 

She found me through my desperation. She smelt the desire for success as it dripped in beads from my temples, as it seeped from my pores and dirtied my clothes. She was infatuated by it and to it she flew. She stalked me, kept to the shadows, taunting me slightly at every turn until her scent mingled in with mine. Corrupting the purity of my determination and making it something heinous and daunting. Something from which I could not escape. The toxin was ripe around me and it infected my lungs, weakening me. Then, as I floundered and fell. She pounced.

I never lost my ambition. It's what she feeds upon. Gorging herself on my frenzied hope of accomplishment, a feast plentiful with choice, all birthed from the mind of a man who can't decide. She can feel the fruits of aspiration sweltering intrinsically within me, she will not cease until they're all dead, maggots writing within them. Rotten, mold spreading like a disease, devouring them. Then she will be done with me, once my riches are spent. However they are woven innately within me. Byproducts of my upbringing. The veins that run through them are extensions of mine. And my end is all that can present them with theirs.

So we will remain like this, this woman and I, entangled in a non-consensual snarl - eternally. Until by the miracle of mortality, one of us fails to take breath. My lust for life ultimately forging our coffins.

Mummy

Her depression was terminal. I remember hearing it before it really hit. Lacing a soft sigh to no one in the kitchen on the morning of my seventh birthday. That was six months after dad died. It wasn't really there in the entirety I know it today, but it was flirting with her, with the idea of her consumption. I suppose it'd be logical to assume the depression was there from the day we put him in the ground, but it wasn't. I became an expert at spotting the difference. There was anguish, and there was pain - but only sadness behind them. It was temporary, and it was safe.

At first she would cry all the time. Weeping at the dinner table, the salt of the gravy welcoming home their cousins found in her tears. Or howling into the darkness, a pillow muffling her screams. A soft cotton hand to replace the callus one that used to banish the moisture from her hot cheeks. No beating heart beneath the cloth, just downy feathers and a wash instruction tag. Do not tumble dry. Cold cycle only.

It wasn't even when the shrieking stopped that I first knew she was finite. Back then I still clung to the hope of repair. I suppose it'd be logical to assume that pain is preferable to death but it isn't. I suppose If something is in pain then at least it's alive, and at least there's the ability to feel left within it. And in her begging I could sense fight. But then came the silence. It was tortuous, even more so than the anguish because at least in the face of horror we're equipped from experience, we know how to make a cup of tea and slap on a warm consoling smile. Even though I was young I was still learned enough to know how to battle misery. But in the silence there was something else, something new, something unnatural.

The tears spilled from her eyes without provocation at awkward and frequent intervals throughout the days, it seemed like she didn't even know they were there anymore. She'd reach an absent hand up to scratch her face and be alarmed by the liquid her fingers met. She'd stare at her moist tips with bewilderment in her frown, as if inquiring how they came to be that way. I suppose she just didn't know the extent of her trauma. Like when a victim is pulled from a crash unaware that they're hurt while their blood and organs are spilling onto the pavement in cascades of crimson like a grotesque waterfall. I suppose It'd be logical to assume that then all it takes is to look down, to lock eyes onto your throbbing intestine, to know you're injured but with her injuries the wounds were hidden. Phantom pains lost within a heart made vacuous by confusion and despair. There was no band aid for her. No antibiotic.

This continued for a while, this bizarre juxtaposition; a woman seemingly healing, but a body betraying her lies, exhibiting her torment. I suppose it would have been logical to assume she was doomed but I couldn't accept this dysphoria as my own. Not me. Not yet. 
But then came the final nail in the coffin she'd spent months building. Months of solo DIY all precisely aimed at this event; she smiled. Just a brief grin, beginning one morning and lasting one day. I arrived downstairs to the smell of bacon and saw her, skipping around pan in hand with a sundress i'd long forgotten existed draped around her body. I watched her and in my youthful innocence I was relieved. To have my mother back, it was such a thing of beauty. I cherished each second she looked at me, naively ignoring the emptiness trapped within the stare. She was lucid, but she was lost. But without the grotesque hands of despair I couldn't recognize the danger. It was as if corroded fingers were previously latched onto her irises and without them I could see the blue again. That was enough for me, so deprived of happiness as I was. We merged into a family again that day, laughing like we used to before the stroke - before dad. We washed the dishes and cleaned the house, I was so ecstatic to have her again that I didn't even protest to the busy work. I soldiered on making sure every dish was sparkling, every surface wiped. She kept saying 'it all has to be clean, it all has to be clean'; I didn't care why. It was difficult to care about anything that day - because she was back. I fell asleep with fantasies of the happier years ahead, things returning somewhat to normality within our depleted family. I suppose it would have been logical to assume that no one can heal that quickly. But I was a child. I was alone. And I was terrified.

I woke in the night with my bladder screaming to be emptied so I scurried to the bathroom. When I entered my foot met a heavy liquid. I could feel the cool ceramic tiles underneath, made colder by the substance coating them. I reached for the light but when i pulled down on the slowly swinging string no illumination occurred. I stumbled forward through more moisture of the same consistency, making splashes as I maneuvered, feeling satisified with every ripple like a toddler at play amongst an october rain. I rubbed my bleary eyes trying to locate the toilet in the abyss. Then suddenly my footing slipped and I fell. Scrabbling to get up from the wet floor I reached for the rim of the bath tub. But something else met my grasp. Rising shakily my gaze fell on the bath, illuminated by the shy rays of ethereal moonlight playfully peeking through the cloud, there she was. My mother. Nude. Surrounded by a slowly coagulating pool of her own wasted blood. The smile she'd held all day still breathing across her face. I remember my first thought when I saw her.It was compulsive and I will always be ashamed for it. I wondered who would take me to school in the morning with her occupied in this manner. I couldn't avert my eyes from her, as banal necessities and responsibilities filled my mind, they stayed locked to the gaping slashes cut sideways through the creases that her elbows made. As they wouldn't move I closed them, instead picturing sunday mornings as an infant, flailing among the bubbles as she flanneled me down. I couldn't bear to open them, to see her lifeless face mock me with it's reality, to have the sinister red stain my memories of her. So I didn't. I sank to the floor, my hands and feet meeting the damp, and began to crawl back towards what I thought was the door. But I collided with a wall almost immediately. I stayed there, curling myself inwards towards the corner I had met, my back to the horror.I stayed there for 36 hours. I suppose it would have been logical to get up, to move, to remove the clothes covered in the dead blood of my grieving mother, to clean myself of each drop of her, to continue my life, to take myself to school, to go to college, to meet a girl, to fall in love, to live. But i'm still there in my head. Because I couldn't. I just couldn't move.

I couldn't get him off me. Not the smell of his cologne as it clung to my clothes. It's showy odor choking my senses and leaving them cloudy. I was lost in it, my clarity an apparition amongst it's smog. I felt hazed by it, like it was surrounding me. Engulfing me. A fog in which we both hid.

I couldn't get him off me. Not the taste of his kiss as it monopolized the space of my lips. Their desperate haste leaving raw marks where his stubble coated chin ground feverishly against my silently screaming mouth. His taste was acrid, an acrimonious cocktail of cheap beer and dead cigarettes. I held a funeral for them on my tongue, wishing each one of them peace in their ashy graves.

I couldn't get him off me. Not the ghost of his touch as it raced across my body, claiming king to whichever section it found. My skin burning at the checkpoints he established, each place where caress turned awry. Bile churned in the depths of my stomach as I received his attention and withstood his devotion. Desiring nothing more myself than to wash him away, to cleanse myself of his invasive existence.

But I couldn't get him off me. No matter how much I tried. I was stained and I was soiled. He tainted every inch of me with his thuggish embrace. I struggled and I screamed, my protests oozing from my mouth and covering me in frothed spittle. Consuming me like playful soap. But the water never ran clear. Tarnished I was cast aside. My senses drenched in all he did, they'd never return immaculate. I, a flattened animal at the side of a lonely road, maggots rotting through my besmirched flesh, unable to escape the confines of my dirty heinous reality.

I couldn't get him off me. But however I am now; abandoned and grotesque with my once virginal skin a road map of unrequited selfish lust - I know he will never wash my blood from his hands. I will stain through his membrane and color his bones. I will seep in to the very marrow and dye it sanguine. I will mingle and run alongside his blood then take home in his heart. I will poison his mind. I will lace every thought. I'll be the microscopic glass to his batch of cocaine. I will never leave him. I will eat him alive. And in time I will kill him.
Then we'll be even.

Star

'I was on top of the world for a while you know. I know you may not believe me, given the way you find me today - but it's not your validation i'm looking for. You're just as pathetic as I am.

It started with a step ladder - a glimpse of the elite - and it never stopped, I carried on climbing higher and higher. Past the clouds my ego soared, as praise and commendation flew my way. Every tongue golden with glorious praise, every lip puckered at my rear. My hairline skimmed the stratosphere and I was gasping for air as angry balls of fire flew past my eyes and burned eternally before me. It seemed I could do no wrong. I knew my time was limited as I was running out of oxygen, but with every desperate and fruitless intake of breath I grew giddier still. My vision blurred and I was high on my own narcissistic and self-righteous delusions. Within success is birthed a feeling of security. It imbues within you a false sense of being untouchable, of obtaining indemnity against frailty. You see, I wanted to enjoy my moment in the sun. To bask in it's warmth so selfishly that it burned my skin to the fourth degree, cooked me ready for a feast, allowed my blood to boil within my heart until it evaporated, becoming nothing and leaving me a hollow shell, an empty glove of a person. I wanted to indulge so absolutely that I could never return to the concrete reality of my prior inferior being. I wanted to be consumed by accomplishment, wrecked by it, to have my essence, my entity, my entire existence, molested and deformed by the hands of adoration.

Because inside I was unrecognizable. I didn't even know my own thoughts any more. They began to sound like someone else ranting inside my skull, someone I admired, someone far removed from me. Someone with a wider vocabulary than mine, a more positive outlook than mine, and even a silkier drawl than mine. That person was all I coveted, so I kept quiet. I hid in the corners watching - admiring. But the stars were charring harder now, the burns began to itch. I couldn't avoid the ache of my lungs even in my asinine stupor, it stabbed through and I gasped and I gasped. The charismatic self smirking through my eyes grew tired of me, first sighing at my endless glee, then shooting me gunshot glances full of disdain and eventually hissing venomously at me as i cowered in my corner.

So I never left. Waste piled up from my fear to migrate and I bathed daily in my own shit, piss and tears. But even my optimal character couldn't anticipate what was about to occur. As it savored the shine that should of belonged to me, we both prepared to die by it. Me; emaciated, vacuous and terminal. It; complete, prosperous and eternal. We flew together, so close to the stars, our skin began melting from our bones, trickling down their structure like desperate droplets expressing pure ecstasy disguised as tragedy. And as we flew ever higher - our lungs collapsing, straining too finally in their quest for relief - we were blinded by the glow of complete achievement. Our skeletal being was almost absorbed by the torridity of immortality, of preservation in time through unequivocal fortune and respect. I could taste the finality of it on my tongue - and it tasted sweet.

Then we began to fall. The ego I had become a prisoner to was shattered in a matter of seconds. It's smirk only a memory that caused me distress and elation in one orgasmic rush. With it destroyed so effortlessly by a string of inimical newspaper articles and noxious whispers behind important hands - I was left alone. I crawled from my corner to the front seat once more but there was no light there, just a crushing black through which I couldn't even see. I don't know how long I fell for, every time I thought I could see the ground approaching  I was presented with further dismal sky through which to drop. I was continuously teased by the alluring certitude of collision, of death. The death of a career, the death of a reputation and the birth of a life of anonymity and mortality.The thought was repulsive to me.

I hope you understand that. You with your eyes brimming with condescending judgement. When you look at me here you don't see a person. You see an addiction, you see a disgrace. I just needed something to numb the pain of falling. Just to take it away for a little while, so I could float again above the clouds. Transcendentally swim in the ghost of perfection. I don't know when I stopped needing the release and started needing the drug. It's all a glittery fog to me. I think the stars have fried my brain. People see me now and pretend they never worshiped me, they turn their gaze away in disgust - because I scare them. I remind them of the fragility of happiness. The delicate nature of status. I had everything. I was the epitome of humanity, and now i'm a sewer rat. A disease ridden stain on the g-string of existence. But jump down from your high horse darling. What have you ever had? Just remember who I was before you scorn me for who I am. I was on top of the world. I was on top of the world.'

Meds

You'd become a simulacrum of your former self. You knew it. People whispered it as you passed them on the street, your past colleagues and lovers all harmonious on the idea that you were a ghost. A phantom in a three piece suit. But their hissing was redundant. You didn't need their vindictive warnings. You'd noticed it the day you left the hospital. Things in the world once so beauteous to you, so stunning  in form and manner - well now they lacked edge, they faded into one another like watery hues dripping down an easel. They merged into blobs of mundane necessity and there was nothing left that thrilled you anymore. The foibles of the world irrelevant, those happy little quirks more impertinent still. Standing in a queue to collect your medication you would pick at the fresh scars delicately thrashing through your thin skin. You'd flick at them until they opened, until they cried tears of crimson down your shaking hand. Trying desperately to feel it - to be hurt by it. But you'd become numb. You'd swallow down the designated cocktail of happy capsules to induce such a perfectly vegetative state, never questioning it's exigency in your life. Only remembering vaguely the horror of the alternative. So as the days blurred by, the memory grew foggier. The colors less vibrant, the screaming less emphatic. Until eventually you couldn't remember at all why you were living your life in such a monochromatic haze. So you missed a dose here, and took a night off there - until you were so clean you could practically hear your blood squeaking. And that's when the voices came back. Old friends collecting in the darker corners of your frantic mind, asking you to do them favors, then commanding your service. The voices took you over and you became an imitation once more. Only this time everything was emphasized. Every little defect the universe suffered made to seem like it was swarming towards you, down a hill, in a car with no brakes, driven by a man you'd wronged. Every nicety so tantalizing and unreachable that it tormented you as you lay sodden between your bed sheet, longing for hallowed slumber. Until one day  after sleep had evaded you for nights on end, and you could barely remember your name - you were reminded of a time not long ago when medication subdued your deranged insanity, calmed it to the point of non-existence. You wondered softly to yourself, among the screams of a thousand stern voices, whether the same situation could occur anon. So as the companions you kept inside your temples urged you to desist, begged you to abstain - you drank down the bottle of abandoned tablets, and celestially closed your eyes.

Lamb

There was a doleful serenity to the spaces within her eyelids. She gazed at the world like it was a gift. Startled and awed by all that presented itself to her. Flitting and fawning between each obstacle, gingerly charmed by all that existed. She was a lamb. Soft and innocent, carefree and curious. Trotting through hardships as if she was lightly skipping through a blossoming meadow. That was before the shepherd arrived. Riding on an ethereal cloud, mighty and undeniable in his superiority. He was a beacon of hopes beyond her means and he exploited that trust, that enamoured delusion. He offered to her a hand, filled with nourishments she could barely comprehend. All the evils and wonders of the hidden world, sinister and tantalizing in their splendor. She gorged on their plenty, her mouth desperate and hungry. She ate and ate, never thinking about where the subsistence descended to after the explosion of taste consumed her. She got high on it. Ravaged by the frenzied euphoria that the treats imbued within her. But they began to take their toll. Her organs churned and her mind depleted. She began to notice the darkness in the world, she grew weary of it round the corners of her flouncing walks. Warped manifestations stemmed from her naivety and she lost her way, straying from the path of daffodils and purity and stumbling further into debauchery. It consumed her, plucked her like a bag of meat and slaughtered her. It sprayed her sinew on the sidewalk, the concrete prison that had sprung from her delicate gardens and it humiliated her. It carved her into prime segments and sold her to the hands of demons, the impish guards of evil. It ravaged her simple mind and deflowered her virgin heart.  It left her dirty and abandoned. Lost and confused. Her bright white fluffy coat of innocence besmirched and her beliefs shattered all around her, she hardened. She formed an exterior of doubt and ridicule, one she exercised readily. The only soft spot that remained, that foible beneath her heart - that belonged to the shepherd. And he would poke at it, molest it until it bled raw, deform her insides beyond repair, strike her from the earth itself - before he would let happiness sprout from her valleys once more.

Fall

His eyes fell upon the descending leaf as it fluttered to it's grave beneath his feet. Fall was here. He could smell it on the air, crisp and heavy. He could feel it's hands lightly touching his shoulders, the places where skin was exposed from his light clothing choices. He could sense it clutching at the caress of summer that had gripped his body these past few months. He could feel it's grip being loosened from around him, and he was afraid. His foot grazed the leaf, he heard it crunch under his stride. He took to a seat on a bench facing the play park. The mellifluous cries of the joyful children warmed his heart. He saw fathers and mothers standing watch, their protective gaze scanning the unknown faces around them. Like lions guarding a herd they waited, patience etched into every wizened line of their troubled faces. He stayed to the shadow of the mighty oak, being sure to remain half hidden in plain sight. He watched the golden curls of a passing girl reflect the light from the mid-afternoon sun. They shone orange where the sun kissed them, and blazed yellow where they hid from it's glow. Ever changing, the shimmer and flash of a liquid sunset mirrored within each lowly strand. He smiled as he was bathed in the luminosity. He saw to his right a young woman sat silently crying, staring with unfixed eyes at him. He knew she couldn't really see him, she was too engrossed in her own torturous thought. She wore dark lipstick, the race tracks from her shadowed eyes mingled in with her lip's lurid hue at the corners creating a tenebrous pool of black. He wondered, if not a little condescendingly, if perhaps when her outside began to match her standoffish appearance - she felt a little bit proud, as if she finally deserved the medals of  misery she wore on her wrists. He returned his gaze to the playing children, marveling in their delicate purity. He longed to be a child again, to be blessed with such virtue - to revel in his own naivety. To battle only the giants of the playground, to know no troubles but grazed knees and broken pinky-swears. But here he sat instead, a man. Whoever he was didn't matter. Only the location, the motive, and the time mattered now - exactly to the second. The lives of every person around him all intertwined in this poignant moment and they would never untangle. His past was of no relevance and his future did not exist. All that lay before him were open chest cavities, marrow freezing screams and slack-jawed mouths that would never smile again. And as the nameless man sighed and envied the innocence, he pushed the detonator that would destroy it.