There is a pool of lava in my stomach that comes out in violent spews, but the words solidify to igneous formations the second they come out of my mouth and in contact with the air. Instantly, the sentiment becomes too heavy to be typed out or uttered. I lack the strength, actually more like the constitution, to lug them to where they need to go. So there they sit, another little knick-knack of forgotten history to collect dust on my shelf. 

Most of the time I feel like a girl in a nearly 30-year-old body, but when the question of my father comes up now I feel like a boiling pot. The screams inside come out like the whistle of a kettle left unattended on the stove. Tar fills my intestines now, not just my lungs. It’s not the kind from cigarettes, it’s pitch and all it wants is to be dropped down the battlements together with feathers. War tar. Ward off the intruders who came into my home and disturbed my well-laid, well-known plans. Every so often, but often when everything feels almost right, it hits. It burns, then cools, then burns again.

There is no regularity to this emotional seismology. The ground is unstable on the isle of elective isolation. Too often, the tides shift between whether this is a choice I made or a choice made for me. With each ebb and flow, my resolve is chiseled away, and then more resentment gets deposited. In the aisles of grocery stores, the smiling face of Tony the Tiger reminds me of times of familial comfort and I am flattened by grief. Things aren't grrrrrrreat.

As a self-imposed orphan, there are new rules that I constantly discover and new taboos to navigate. To what degree of familial relation does my stomach acid churn? The other day my grandmother, whose Christmas and New Year's messages I wholly ignored, sent another social media olive branch to let me know her sister had died. Actually, to be more clear, it wasn't an olive branch as this chasm that has grown has nothing to do with her. It was just a grandmother reaching out to her granddaughter in a moment of her own grief. She said that at some point I had given some social media reaction to something or another she had posted, which she said gave her great comfort. I have no recollection of this at all. Likely, phone in hand as I listened to lectures while falling asleep, phone screen set to perennially glow as I find the blue light to be a comfort at night, a slip of the finger caused the unintentional act that brought my grandmother so much solace. My voicebox, my through, my heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys have all sunk down to my ankles. The lava pool is now an endless pit. 

Quickly, without opening her message, I archived the chat.

There's a rooftop in my new office building where I spend 15 minutes every hour and a half walking around in circles, trying to get my steps in and stretch. 

Back in August, in the psych ward, there was a long hallway where I would do the same. Actually, the whole ward was basically just this hallway, doors on either side and a nurse's station at the end, leading on one side to the open common area and on the other a wall. The hallway was punctuated with some couches, doors to the rooms, and lined with handrails. Every hour, I'd walk back and forth ten times, counting each step until I reached 500. Sometimes joined by fellow patients or nurses. 

There's nothing else to do. 

There's sunlight now and I'm back in school, back to a somewhat normal routine but still, I'm walking back and forth, in an endless rote loop, dragging my feet through the minutia of everyday and reliving in my head the memories of who I used to be and the emotions I used to feel. 

Back and forth. Around in circles. Counting the seconds and steps that take me further away from the last time I felt joy.

For about two months after my brain snapped in half, I couldn’t listen to anything but instrumentals. Terror would grip me every time I’d hear lyrics and I hid in the safety of music that didn’t try to evoke any emotions. I wasn’t scared I’d feel too much, triggered by words talking about love - I was so afraid that i wouldn’t feel anything at all. That my internal machinery was so broken that I wouldn’t be able to feel any emotions again, that the big grey bleak clouds had seeped all the way into my lungs, co-living with the tobacco tar in my capillaries and leaving no room for a sigh of relief. No words. Dull every moment with mindless media consumption, anything to distract me from the fact that in a few months I went from having the biggest dreams and a life so full of promise, but now could barely even leave bed. The streets of my own neighborhood were no longer safe. My own mind wasn’t safe.

Slowly, the words came back. Then the progress stalled. Is this all there is? Is this as far as recovery goes? It’s been months and I can’t imagine ever getting back to how bulletproof I felt back in May. Instead, my veins just continue feeling like they're filled with lead. The words are back but now there’s just this static all the time. A background symphony of swelling buzzing sounds. It’s not calming like white noise or quieting like brown noise. No stimulation, unlike green noise. Pink noise, apparently, is a thing but it isn’t that either. It’s just a muffle, the sound of my separation from who I used to be. It’s an audio curtain, keeping me from reaching back or moving forward. TV static, radio static, brain static. All symptoms of not getting sufficient signal to make the show go on.

Underwater. 6 feet under packed, heavy dirt. My skin feels like it’s on fire, but only in a way that shortcircuits my nervous system. Not that kind of fire that makes you feel alive. The flimsy card tower of my mood is threatened every second to be blown away by the wind. All the elements are present and I’m like the goddamn avatar of clinical depression. 

This year started out so promising, too. Instead it just ended up being all about loss. God, I used to feel like the world was an apple and all I wanted to do was unhinge my jaw and take out a bite so big that the juices would drip down my chin. Instead, I just became unhinged and the gravity that held my life together grew too weak, things spun too fast, and everything got flung all over to distant corners of the universe. Now life is just a Vidalia onion with good marketing. No amount of shiny packaging can change the fact that I just bit into an onion, and a rotten one at that. 

With the holidays coming up, the worst loss of all has been stabbing me in the side. And in the throat. Actually, all over. It's like I'm trapped in an iron maiden and every inch of my body is being stabbed over and over. Are these pores or puncture holes? I was finally growing to feel like I had a family and now it's all gone. Right after getting out of the psych ward, I tried to reconcile with my dad but it was terrible. I couldn't look at him without feeling so much resentment. Any words I could have said rose up instead as bile in my mouth. The relationship we had turned to dust in my hands and I can't do anything about it. So this year will be the first I'll ever spend the holidays alone and the second time ever in my life I'll spend them away from my dad. Losing that relationship, with the person most important to me in the world, that's been the hardest. The keys to the kingdom have been thrown away and I'm locked out of home. What's worse is it's my own inability to walk back inside that's keeping everything this way. The prodigal child. I ruminate all day about whether to let them back in and then I puke in my mouth at the thought. It brings on a Nausea, which I guess makes me feel more like a Sartre lover but really mostly just makes me feel bluer. 

My google search history is not filled with holiday wishlists or what to get a parent who has everything except a loving, mentally well daughter. My curiosities have leaned more towards passive ways to kick the bucket. Or calculations for hanging ropes. Makes me regret lowering my ceilings. It’s a constant doom scroll of demise but I don’t think I’ll act on it. It’s too tiring waking up again not dead, even when you don’t get dumped. Maybe I’ll give it a year. Who knows. 

Truthfully, the cravings for permanent quiescence haven't really gotten any better, but unfortunately, the dark nights of the soul don't fit into my calendar anymore. Begrudgingly and with great huffing and puffing, I still have to do all the crappy life maintenance things that come with the territory of sticking around. Suicide is a choice but what happens when I'm too detached at this point to even bother choosing? I've never had passive suicidal ideation before, it was always an active pursuit. The anorexia was my marathon training, the acute self-destructive behavior with drinking binges my HIIT sessions, the cutting and the hanging, I dunno, sprints? I can't even think of analogies anymore I'm just too blue.

I was watching a video today of a memory from last year, you know when Google Photos sends you little reminders of the passage of time and how you can't physically feel joy anymore? Who came up with that anyway? No one wants to remember things, says my focus group of one. Real depressing shit, but then again what isn't to someone who's depressed.

But it's low-grade now so who gives a fuck. I just want to feel excited about something, instead of just under water.

A rare bird

 While I truly appreciated the compliment, I would be remiss to say I ever fully understood it. A rare bird. It was three or four times when you enunciated it in the most intimate conversations but geez. What the fuck does that really mean, man? And why did you constantly drum on about it? An improbable affection, but one I've nursed for a while now. Tender, if I ever had to choose a word for you and my emotions then project those across the Pacific Ocean.

Like a baby bird, mouth agape and barely breathing from the hunger and expectation of worms. That's how I felt. A breath of fresh air that didn't feel like one because my jaw was unhinged from screaming. Yet, there you were, soothing and calming and there.

Sure, it sounds dramatic but we met at very inopportune times. Personally, I was barely out of my scrubs, the whiff of the psych ward still unscrubbed from my skin. But that didn't matter to you. I felt like a damn pariah after being carted off and you saw through it all to call me a goddamn. rare. bird. 

Whatever the fuck that means.

For months, you were my favorite notification. Sure, it wasn't logical, since the logistics couldn't ever logistic the illogical. 13-hour time difference, but damn I felt so close to you. In dreams, in mind, in my throat like a lump I couldn't swallow. But when I move there, on your western continent after law school, you're not gonna leave the Midwest. But damn, it was fun to dream.

It was a brief foray into the unknown that I tried with previous men and the burn burned. Bad people. Narcissistic pieces of shit. One of them broke up with me a day after I tried to kill myself. That trauma haunts me, and hurts me to this day but you called me a rare bird and in turn, you puffed your chest and said all the words my ears needed to hear: You don't deserve to be hurt, you didn't deserve that treatment, you are a rocket of a person (whatever the fuck that means), and whoever was mean to me was your enemy too. Perhaps a bit more argumentative than I needed, coming from a relationship with a man who couldn't feel empathy, but it was appreciated.

Birds, rockets, and oh, let's not forget, rainbows.

Then Bali and the reality crashed down on our heads. My dear, sweet drummer boy, how would we beat this? We can't. But the feelings are felt and the ending doesn't end the way we would have wanted it to. Now what do I do, after recovering from the cruelest person I've ever met and meeting such a kind person, turntables turning and being on the other end and geez geez Jesus, no one knows what I'm talking about but God it's confusing to me too okay?

I don't think, I can't think, I lack the capacity to think, but if I had met you before that summer, then we could have had a different timeline. I am now guarded, more than before, more than ever. 

Still, you're here. Like you said, you're always here. And damn does that make me happy. 

 Do you still drop, stop, and roll when your skin feels like it's on fire?

What if it's from an internal burning, some deep coal mine blaze in your veins? It's been silently seething away, quiet and eating up all the oxygen for years, and now you're left gasping for breath on the floor. Hands turn to claws that grip so tight against your skin that they draw blood, even if you're oh so careful to cut your nails tight and short. If you could go down to the quick, you would. Take away the sharp, the weapons. 

The body is a vessel fully capable of betrayal. The mind, a soft enemy. In philosophy class, eons ago, my professor asked us who we are. Are we our bodies? If so, what happens if you lose a leg? Are we still the same, considering a fourth of what we thought was our identity has essentially been lost? It was the introduction class, noone had an answer. Over a decade later, I wonder now why he didn't ask more questions regarding mental health.

Am I my depression or is it a part of me? Is it not me? Does it destroy me? Am I a ruin? Lying here now, in a ball on the floor, a position I have mastered over the last months and taken to its pinnacle performance over the last few hours, completely frozen and terrified of moving, I have to wonder who I am when I don't trust my own mind. 

Oh god, the betrayal. It's the only one where your only real choice is to forgive, and not just forget. The self, who you have to face every day in the mirror. Moses split the Red Sea, sure, but if I can whine, and I will, I'm left with the far harder task of mending together a psyche torn apart with no god on my side.

Every morning has the chance to be perfect. But then the voices start and you slowly realize, with growing horror, that they aren't schizophrenic illusions but your own thoughts. The pulse of your wrists starts whispering, then screaming through the thin skin. Soon enough, the thud of your heart is all that rings in your ears. That's the first in the choir. Then there's the baritone of your vertebrae, calling out to you to snap them with a noose. It's a deep addition to the chorus. Your organs, those fluttering beings you feel lying flat on your back, palm to the belly. They ask for pills. 

It's a small song, but it lasts until the next morning. It's a neverending loop.

Everyday.  Everyday. It hasn't gotten any better, at best it's gotten to the point where the volume modulates. But when it's loud, the static, it fills my head, it fills the room. Sure, there have been okay days but how long can someone survive on just okay? I feel like a survivalist who has run out of rations, subsisting on rainwater and spare kills.

My body is alien. My body is a traitor. My body begs me to destroy it. My skin is scarred in white and purple and all I can see when I look at it isn't the tender flesh of a person, but a lack of cuts. The veins that pulse right underneath ache to be let open. Bloodletting, the release of it all. Once upon a time, I had dreams and projections into the future and now all I feel is dread for the next bad day. I used to feel like a person and now all I feel is a need that gnaws at my bones, begging them to meet the air and reminding me constantly that a scalpel is just there, tucked away into a book and now that I'm not supposed to be a risk to myself, no one will stop me, no one will find me. I feel this deep phantom pain constantly, but not from loss of limb but loss of any semblance of life.

I honestly don't know how much longer I can live like this.

 Have you ever cried so hard that your whole body just starts to sweat? My parasympathetic nervous system has never been my friend. Ironic, because of the name. The last two weeks I've been dealing with a low-grade depression that I've begun to regard as a pesky shadow that I can't banish no matter how much Vitamin D I manage to squeeze in. Asshole I used to date has taken this as the time to be a huger asshole, questioning if I have a life. No, dude, I don't. Right now? No. I have a chain of weights around my neck and I'm doing my best to survive but the last few months have nt been a life and if you had any compassion you'd know that. I hate that a fucking idiot boy affected me so much, but like before, I was already sinking and he just pushed me again. Now, I'm drowning. It's a catastrophic feminist tragedy, to be affected by a cruel man but it's true. He reminds me of my mother. Selfish. 

My whole body is betraying me. Head, shoulders, knees, and toes. It starts with my mind. Oh god it hurts. Then my skin, oh god it hurts. Then I stare at my veins, my wrists, all the places where I know a pulse beats and it feels so warm and inviting to cut. Recently, this has included the stress veins in my neck. What warm red secrets do they hold? My skin is so warm, so sensitive and I can hear it begging me to cut, cut, cut.

In moments like these, I'm most grateful for my dog. The little mutt, with her big brown eyes rimmed with funny eyeliner and starting to get sprinkles of powder sugar, she needs me. So every morning no matter how much I want to rot in bed, I have to get up, always with a groan, to give her a walk. She's a darling creature, truly, the sweetest animal. Never a complaint, always a concerned glance. If she wasn't here I doubt I'd even get myself up to go to the bathroom. Is it still low-grade if you can't be bothered to walk the 10 meters to the toilet and imagine yourself instead as a corpse covered in your own piss and feces, to be found by neighbors who trace back the stench of decay? Is it still low-grade if you spent the last 10 days bawling your eyes out, an activity only punctuated by pause when the mutt needs to go for a walk? What is the scale here, what is low-grade, what is happening to me and oh god how do I make it stop?

I've become grateful for inertia. It's second nature now to just sit on the couch, immobile for hours. If I could summon the strength to do anything, it would be a quick dash to the pockets of scalpels I've hidden everywhere in the house and oh god, to let the pain out again in blood again. I have been self-isolating, been getting worse and lower and dirtier, but I haven't been cutting. Instead, I've been crying. Fetal position, curled into the tightest ball my arthritic hands can compress me into and just screaming. Screaming and screaming and screaming. Occassionally a guttural, primal sound. Mostly, a plea of ascending volume. Please make it stop, I beg. Starting as a mewing kitting, ending as a screech. All the time, it's the closest I've ever gotten to a sincere prayer. Childhood with its sore knees crunching against grains of rice pales in comparison to the shrine of pain at whose foot I worship now. Make it end. Please. Make it stop. Please. I've done everything. The pills, the running, the therapy, the community, the busy work and still, as soon as I hold still, there is that hand on my shoulder, that ghost of a thought and it jerks me back so hard I get whiplash. Who am I even praying to? Jesus? Allah? Buddha? Fucking Santa Claus?

Wherever you go, there you are. That is the most threatening phrase I have ever heard. I'm my own biggest fear.

You know, a few months ago when I was in the Big Crisis, everyone was there. Even my ex who I despise was calling my friends trying to get my dad's number so someone could get to me before I did something irreparable. When I found out about that, honestly, I was outraged. How dare he care. It made me feel like scum, because I didn't. We abhor each other but he wants me more alive than I do? Ridiculous. But now? It's quiet. I go days without talking to anyone. Job contract completed and if class is canceled, I just sit at home until the scheduled mutt walks then I rush back home. How embarrassing every time too, since those guards saw me strapped to a gurney, screaming and bleeding and crying back in August. Now I asked them if my food and groceries had been dropped off. The holiday decorations are up in the lobby. I want to drive the little wood spikes attached to the candy canes into my chest. Passive suicidal ideation. Passive self-harm thoughts. Passive, for now. And horribly, I know that since the spotlight has shifted and I'm back in class and whatever, if I kill myself now then no one will know for days.

I am so goddamn terrified all the time. Who will walk my mutt if I fail again?

Notes for N

A small, small man with a massive temper. The bigger the anger, the smaller the man seems. Over and over he said let's not let ego get in the way, which I took to mean we both have to bend. But ego isn't my issue and it never was. Now I clearly see it's his. What derailed it all was my depression, the antithesis of ego, the atomic bomb aimed against the self. We were collateral. Now, he sits in the dark like Gollum and harbors an unwarranted hatred against someone else's disability as if anything bad ever happened to him. Stubborn and angry and vile, like a jagged creature, this anger sits and seems to grow and all I can do is laugh at its existence. If depression is a thief by nature, anger is pathetic because of its misplacement.

I went to sit in the sunshine and learned to forgive in between the massive waves that rolled my body. The long, slow months of torment, the tormenter being my own mind of course, where every second I spent dissecting and stitching back up every moment where I could have done or been better, those months they ended and those tortuous and insidious thoughts just washed away. Mostly, I forgave myself. Incidentally, I forgave him. 

Then, finally, a response and finally, some closure. A small man with a mighty temper. An angry man with no reason to feel wronged. A pathetic thing calling others names. A big love turned sour, turned putrid, turned rancid, but not in my mouth. And in my stomach, in the sweat on my brow? Nothing but pity for this sad, small thing that I used to call lover. Once you see past the bravado and the masculine rage, once you know that there was nothing truly done against them, once you see in your hands the medical reports and the MRI scans that searched to see if the breakdown caused you any brain damage, and then see some sad small man asking for a pittance for a trip you never should have been on, then you see why ego is their problem and not yours. And then you forgive. Like the waves washing away marks on the sand. And you pity, because they choose to sit in such a transient state like anger.

I used to think he was the one that got away, but now I know he's the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. It sounds resentful, maybe even bitter. But it's not. Hurt people hurt people, but hurt people also cannot be understood by people who have never been hurt. Else, we end up here. He is small because he's never been cowed by big feelings. So when they happen to others, he takes it as a personal affront. Ego, he said. Ego, I now understand.

I was supposed to have spend the summer in New York. The love I feel for that place is something he never could get. Instead I spent my precious place between semesters schlepping around in a country I disliked with a man I didn't understand. It was fine. It was a time. I wish it never happened.

The first time I saw him, my thought was "That'll do." Then for months he hounded me like a bat out of hell and I honestly thought he was a pest. I disliked him. I thought he was shallow and stupid. I won't get into it again how I fell into that honey trap, but let's get back to how I crawled my way out of it.

Entitled, small, angry men. 

Bali was good for me. Sounds corny as fuck, but it was. For a while, a long while, there was this creeping feeling that I got where I worried that I would never be able to feel joy again. I imagined it like a massive centipede, its synchronous legs moving in waves up from my ankles, to my tailbone, then up my spine until it wrapped like a scared critter around my neck. That was the fear. What if the psychosis took away my ability to feel joy? MRI shows no brain damage from the episode. Okay, then why am I still without this key emotion?

Then I took a trip. Paid for by a friend, better than a friend. A person that I should have stuck with instead of letting this insidious man into my house in April. And joy crept back in. Wind and sun and sand and surf and joy. The breath I took when I finally realized that I was still capable, oh god I still hear the sound in my throat.

I get back, I get blue, I bounce back, I get better. Then I forgive and get told I'm a fly with no life by an angry and small man. I get blue. It's a crying shame, truly, that I can't even process this depressive bout without having to think back to him. I deeply resent that this hurt of mine, this illness, has been linked to this man, both in memory and in medical records. Something so personal, so mine, has to be shared with another. 

His anger made me feel sorry for him. Months later, he seems to be operating under the impression that I want him still. No, what I want is my illness to be just mine again. I don't want to share it anymore. I want to pry apart July and segregate it so I can find the pieces of myself I lost. I want to delete him and his horrors and take back my life. How difficult it has been to recover from this horrible low when I have him as a weight around my throat? I want it gone but it's been impossible to dissect the whole mess. 

The ego thing, let's get back to that. Months later and hearing someone say their eyes are so special, that they're owed your silence. The curtain pushed back and I saw the pedestal he put himself on and it made me laugh. He was so angry and I was just laughing and laughing. I'm not going to read this, blah blah, so much anger. I imagined him as a red-faced baby with a huge head filled with hot air and ego and I laughed. All that indignance, that entitlement, that ego. I feel bad for him. How sad to be so small, so easily affronted, so convinced of one's victimhood.

Now though, I realize I owe him nothing. The axe he tries to hold over my head means nothing. His anger means nothing. He has taken way more than he ever deserves. Charge by the hour and he'll be neck deep in debt to me. But I forgive. I'll always forgive. He will always choose to be angry. But he is so small he will never realize he has no right to be angry. I wish we never met, but I still wish him the best. He needs that, since he's the fucking worst.

 Perspective is everything. I got my right eye re-Lasiked back in July, but then the milky clouds of depression started setting in, blocking the view. Hindsight is 20/20 and so is my vision now. For the first time in months, this morning I woke up and felt like myself. Not wholly whole, but contained within my own walls at least. The day didn't feel like a day away from the loss, but a day away from the fall. Dreadfully, on the other hand, it also feels like another day towards what could be another spill, leaving my brain all over the floor.

Jesus what a weird summer. All my senses were firing off at full throttle. First, it was positive and I felt so alive. Sure, that was fun. But was the end worth it? Topic for another day. 

I'm terrified of my own mind now. I'm checking all the boxes to get back to myself. Exercise. Meds. Therapy, so much therapy it's burning through my finances. Seeing friends. Being productive, keeping busy. Trying out new hobbies. Focusing on quality sleep that never comes. It's getting better but there is this gnawing that keeps me up, wondering when it will come back. Why fight so hard to be the person you want to be when you can lose it all at the drop of a hat? I'm trying but it's incredibly more difficult to gain back your sense of self when you feel like a ticking time bomb.

The mental effort it took to pick myself off my bloodstained floors and go from self-harming, suicidal, and in an actual mental health facility to, in a week, attending classes and reading hundreds of pages a day trying to digest corporation law terms and Supreme Court decisions, it was no easy feat. In a way, I'm proud of myself for once again getting through it. But mostly, I am scared that it's just a matter of time before it all fall apart again. I fall apart again. Am I resilient in the face of a crushing disease or am I a wobbly Jenga tower just waiting for the next turn to collapse? Before I used to pride myself on how I picked myself up, but now I feel like a fall risk, a disaster waiting to happen and there's no way to escape or avoid it since it's my own mind that holds the gun to my own head.

This time was the worst time. I have never felt so low in my life. How can I trust a mind that broke so cleanly, that broke from reality, that betrayed me in the most fundamental way that what I was perceiving couldn't even be relied upon? My emotions, particularly the sadness, those have always been problem children. But my memory, my capacity for logic, my sense of what is real. Those never left me. I could always know what was happening and even if I couldn't control the reactions I had, I was at least sure things were real. This time, I fell apart so completely that all my systems exploded. My nervous system. My support system. My self-care. It was all gone. And the worst part is I can't even remember half of how I lost it all. Even when I can remember things, they're tinted with doubt. Did this really happen? Was this real? What the fuck?

I've stopped counting the days as the distance between when I lost the relationship to now I see it as space from when I lost my joy. But looking forward instead of backwards, I've started counting them to see how long I can hold it together, to try and notice if there's any pattern to this, some succession of years where I can predict it coming back. I can't go through this again. 

 What do you do when your brain steals away what your heart wants? Start a civil war, of course. For two monthis I've been plagued of war flashbacks of my own behavior ruining the best partnership I ever had before it could even really start. There is no end in sight and there have been significant casualties. 

On one side of the battlefield is a battalion of What ifs. Armed with hindsight, they take their aim and shoot at every opportunity I had to have acted better, held on to things that mattered, where things could have had a different outcome. If I had acted differently, not hallucinated, not felt like a red hot wound and ruined everything? Power weapons of psychological warfare. On the other side is my diagnosis. The war cry: what if what, what if I didn't get sick? What use it is to live in the trenches of blame and shame when medically, you weren't fit for battle? But the battle was started by the brain when that should have been a time of extended peace. Back and forth they go, my heart in the middle of their territorial dispute, aggrieved and wounded and bleeding. 

What do you do when your brain robs you of who you are so quickly, like a thief in the night, to the point when the person you love doesn't even want to talk to you? Death bells ring for both the person your brain let you be and the person your heart wanted most. In three weeks, everything was lost to the carnage and horrors of war. There is no point chasing ghosts, but what if they haunt you?

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Cold shadows are cast long over where I used to bask in the sun. That was all that was won in the war of my mind and my love, the indifference of someone who used to be crazy attached to me. In the struggle to rebuild, reparations must be paid but the price is too high. Stop saying please and sorry, it falls on deaf ears. Ears that couldn't care less if they never hear your voice again when all yours want is to hear just one more "babe". Or the way your name rolled out of their mouth. Or anything, just anything. I would take hate over this any day.

My brain may be afflicted with psychological cancer but my heart has been cursed. A weight sits on it that could make Atlas flinch. Cursed to be distant, cursed with an eternity of indifference, all as punishment for not holding it together for one month. A lifetime of remembering that brief moment in the sun. A forever number of forevers of holding on to a handful of memories until they're smooth like river stones but stab like knives. A heart full of blame that only aims inwards. My mind fell apart and in the aftermath, I couldn't find the one thing my heart wanted most anymore. There's no coming back from indifference. It's an eternal damnation to your soul. First, they don't feel sweet anymore because you've soured into vinegar, then they don't feel anything at all because you've continued decomposing and have now completely disappeared. I can come back to this, but part of that is accepting he'll never come back. The civil war culminated in an atomic bomb.