The night I had that dream, the one with the knights fighting?
I guess I never woke up. Not the me that once was.
He was lost, and another was born.
It happened long before word ever spoke it.
It happened in the silence, tearing from the inside out.
Many believe the cuts come from the outside, but they don’t. They’re just a symbol, a fragment of a pain that can’t be seen, only felt.
Many will say “you’re fine,” many will say “think brighter.” As if we don’t know. But knowing logically, and feeling embraced by irrationality are two very different powers, pulling, dragging, pushing. Toward the fire, than the ice. Torn between dark and the grave.
The painful voice feeling more soft and comforting, the hopeful voice feeling more critical and impossible. It’s not that we don’t know where we should be and how we should think, it’s that we don’t feel we deserve it and it feel so far out of reach.
Feeling like a murderer, having killed so many good parts of our minds and the best of our relationships. Whether it’s true or not we believe all this, because as comforting as a loved ones voice can be, it’s hard to block out the voice we know so well, one that’s always there for you, always speaking to you. Choosing between what’s painful yet familiar, and what is hopeful yet requires sacrifice of a sense of control.
See, if we can plan for the moment when it all crumbles around us, we will have already felt the chaos, the pain, the mourning. We believe it will be easier that way. We punish ourselves before anyone can do it to us.
We feed on darkness, and we drink from the blood drained from our wrists, hoping to recycle any sense of feeling, even if it’s bad.
This may be gruesome, but to us it doesn’t matter, because the numbness has already taken over.
Welcome to the mind of one who kisses death daily, but stays anyway. So instead of trying to fix them, thank them, because they have to painfully choose what you probably did at birth and never again. They choose to live another hour, day, year, and hopefully more.
We say zombies are science fiction, but they’re all around us, feeding on their own brains, till there’s nothing left.
Then the light shines through, always right as we want to close our lungs.
And so the cycle begins.
But here’s what I believe, we have a power. The moment our demons feel oxygen they start to die and wither. They keep best in dark damp head spaces. Use your vocal cords as a catapult and throw them into the fire we call sunlight. Spread them thin as you give their limbs to friends, family and counselors and then pull till they can’t stand it.