Leather
There's always a certain point where you can feel yourself begin to descend back down. After a while, you learn your own triggers. Exhaustion, rejection, threat, panic. They swirl together in your head, you have to shut yourself down to quiet them. Stop thinking, stop feeling. That desperate attempt to calm the storm that seems to constantly rage, to surface when you become too tired to fight it back. And you realize how exhausting life is. How tired you get of pushing it back. How wonderful, how terrible it would be to stop pushing and let it wash over you. Collapse back down into it again. Permanent numbness.
Of course, numbness never really works. It's then that you become so painfully aware of your body. Of the bones of your wrist, the tendons in the back of your hand, the sharpness of your teeth. The veins that run everywhere, the pulse in the soft places...hands constantly dart to the wrist, the base of the throat. Feeling the pulse, pushing at it, counting by it. Calming down to the rhythm, that isn't really a rhythm at all anymore because you've spent so much of your life trying to break it. Sent it into a perpetual, panicked confusion, skittering about your body and hiding, so that sometimes you can't find it. And you sit, counting the seconds, convinced you are really dead, because there's nothing happening in that hollow on the side of your wrist. You press your hands to your chest, waiting. Eventually it comes back. Tricked you. Relief and disappointment, at once. Sometimes it's angry, throwing itself against your ribcage, your throat, your skull, until the room spins and the walls leer and you can barely remember how to smile reassuringly and wave off the concern.
And you remember that sick feeling. So horrifyingly well. And that little part of you that you'd like to forget about longs for it. The coldness of pain, the disassociation. You plan for it all day, eventually begin to find it in any way you can. Cup after cup of cheap acidic coffee, black, oil swirling on the surface like gasoline. The way it bites at your stomach at 2am, makes your hands shake and your head spin while you write, manically. The pages never make sense in the morning. Scattered and nonsensical, in shaken, infantile handwriting. The yellow circles hidden in the box on the shelf, swallowed when you need more bite, more trembling. Followed by aspirin when your body has given up on you, has become so unpredictable you live with your fingertips perpetually pressed to your wrist, or, at night, the inside of your thigh. Humming a tune to the scattered beat of what's left of your heart. The aspirin always works, blood roses blossom up under the skin, wilt and fade. Sick, sick. At least its an explanation. Its solid. Something you can point to, quantify. Not like everything that happens in your head in the middle of the night when you're afraid to turn out the light. Even so, you never tell. You never tell anybody, because telling a secret is losing it. And losing this last bit of control, this ability to point to something and say, definitively, that is what's wrong with me, that would be worse than anything you can imagine. Then you're left with your thoughts, the whirl, the panic and helplessness that you can't ever define or predict. So much better to give it body, to give it your body, which you have grown rather tired of inhabiting anyway. And you find that eventually, you're watching your life from a distance. Removed, amused, bored. Letting this other thing take over while you conveniently flit away into a corner, fall asleep in the hollow space you've created of yourself. Pushed out by whatever you can swallow or press into you, whatever works.
You remember it all. Miss it. Teeter on the edge, wondering whether or not you should fall. Thinking perhaps it would be an interesting experiment. Perhaps a disaster. Usually both, but in your mind it's always got to be one or the other.
Of course, numbness never really works. It's then that you become so painfully aware of your body. Of the bones of your wrist, the tendons in the back of your hand, the sharpness of your teeth. The veins that run everywhere, the pulse in the soft places...hands constantly dart to the wrist, the base of the throat. Feeling the pulse, pushing at it, counting by it. Calming down to the rhythm, that isn't really a rhythm at all anymore because you've spent so much of your life trying to break it. Sent it into a perpetual, panicked confusion, skittering about your body and hiding, so that sometimes you can't find it. And you sit, counting the seconds, convinced you are really dead, because there's nothing happening in that hollow on the side of your wrist. You press your hands to your chest, waiting. Eventually it comes back. Tricked you. Relief and disappointment, at once. Sometimes it's angry, throwing itself against your ribcage, your throat, your skull, until the room spins and the walls leer and you can barely remember how to smile reassuringly and wave off the concern.
And you remember that sick feeling. So horrifyingly well. And that little part of you that you'd like to forget about longs for it. The coldness of pain, the disassociation. You plan for it all day, eventually begin to find it in any way you can. Cup after cup of cheap acidic coffee, black, oil swirling on the surface like gasoline. The way it bites at your stomach at 2am, makes your hands shake and your head spin while you write, manically. The pages never make sense in the morning. Scattered and nonsensical, in shaken, infantile handwriting. The yellow circles hidden in the box on the shelf, swallowed when you need more bite, more trembling. Followed by aspirin when your body has given up on you, has become so unpredictable you live with your fingertips perpetually pressed to your wrist, or, at night, the inside of your thigh. Humming a tune to the scattered beat of what's left of your heart. The aspirin always works, blood roses blossom up under the skin, wilt and fade. Sick, sick. At least its an explanation. Its solid. Something you can point to, quantify. Not like everything that happens in your head in the middle of the night when you're afraid to turn out the light. Even so, you never tell. You never tell anybody, because telling a secret is losing it. And losing this last bit of control, this ability to point to something and say, definitively, that is what's wrong with me, that would be worse than anything you can imagine. Then you're left with your thoughts, the whirl, the panic and helplessness that you can't ever define or predict. So much better to give it body, to give it your body, which you have grown rather tired of inhabiting anyway. And you find that eventually, you're watching your life from a distance. Removed, amused, bored. Letting this other thing take over while you conveniently flit away into a corner, fall asleep in the hollow space you've created of yourself. Pushed out by whatever you can swallow or press into you, whatever works.
You remember it all. Miss it. Teeter on the edge, wondering whether or not you should fall. Thinking perhaps it would be an interesting experiment. Perhaps a disaster. Usually both, but in your mind it's always got to be one or the other.