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.