I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable. I am searching for an explanation of the unexplainable. I am looking for something without tangible origin. It is something I feel deep in my bones and in these bones alone. I am trapped in a way that only I can explain. It has no name, no face, no shape. It is a stranger who carved me in my mothers womb from the finest marble. I don’t believe in anything other than the ongoing existential crisis of searching, searching, searching. Where do I find you? The shadow at the foot of my bed grows each night, but I can finally see just past it, beyond its lingering taste of salt and ash. 

The hallways of my mind are filled with the sweetest music to drown out the screams coming from locked rooms. I thought I knew everything behind those doors and the horrors behind them, but the house expanded, filling my skull to the brim until it nearly burst through my eyes. My skull is a single reminder of mortality. The blood that pools hot under my throat and wrists is a reminder of how unfortunately human I am. The growing of my hair is a reminder of time passing quicker than I can manage to keep up with. My breath is a reminder that I am alive, I am filled with dread. 

I am wide awake, it is morning. It is a clear summer day. The swans are out on the lake, the children are playing in the yard. There’s a knot in the bottom of my stomach that reaches up into my chest, tugs on my ribs, grips my heart. The clean sheets I have no memory of putting on my bed caress my chilled body. These shivers rattle my spine and chatter my teeth. There is domesticity in decay, but if I stay here, I will die. 

My legs are moving on their own. Miles and miles of dust and dirt are kicked up behind me. We are two separate entities. Missing teeth and fluorescent liquor store signs are just beyond the horizon. I chase down the bottle. So red, so gruesome, so frightening. It is a violent, fleeting thing, to know exactly what you are but to be so far from the truth. You know who did this to you, but you cannot see them in this life. It’ll burn and boil inside until fire seeps from my pores and the flame snuffs out once and for all. 

Ignorance is not bliss, knowing you have power over God is bliss. Ardent love of self till death do us part. A pack of wolves approaches, they ask you to join them. Do you? Run free and finally breathe that air you’ve been chasing for more lives than you can count on your fingers. Taste it, is it good? Is it the best you’ve ever had?

I had a dream a few months back, one of those dreams that feels so real that you go throughout your day petrified that someone will know what you are. I drew a knife, hit him right in the jugular. I awoke to the feeling of a cold blade in my right hand and the warmth of blood on my skin. I’d watched a man die not at the hand of God, but at mine. Guilt tugged at me, not because my consciousness had festered a gruesome scenario, but because I’d killed him.  I was in the place of God, to choose to take a life. If killing feels so good to us, then killing must feel good to God too. 

Some nights, when the ringing in my ears has subsided enough, and the world stops its never-ending rotation around the sun, burning forever at the center of things, there’s a single moment of clarity. I am going to shatter every mirror in my house and arrange the shards like a puzzle piece to see myself for the first time again. Hell is the sun. Could these dreams exist without a vessel to hold them, or will they turn to stone the very second they hit the air?

I am wide awake, it is morning. He reaches into the emptiness where my stomach should be and pulls the darkness out. I am sick, I am alive.