this is survival

This is unreal. This is waking up in the same bed, different world, different head. This is someone’s shitty attempt at stylistic camerawork – first person, last picked. This is feeling without feeling. This is cold water meets skin meets face but never meets you. This is empty footsteps, heartbeats, conversations, this is empty head, ribcage, thoughts – why bother with any of these things if you don’t have the pleasure of calling them your own? This is walking without presence, breathing loudly just so you can trick yourself into thinking that the sound is coming from your own mouth, this is having to excuse yourself to the restroom to see yourself in the mirror, touch the surfaces of the dirty bathroom with your clammy hands, this is desperation. This is suffocation. This is drowning. This is unreal. This is coming home to unfamiliar reflections. This is heavy breathing, this is nails meet skin meet throat meet can’t-see-can’t-feel-can’t-breathe-don’t-understand, this is wondering when the world will come back. This is wondering if there’s a world that will come back to you. This is crying, foggy eyesight, shaking hands, this is an attack. This is domination, this is obliteration, this is seeing the body deteriorate in the mirror, images that aren’t yours become images of what shouldn’t be. This is shivering in bed, imagining the reflection melt into black and splatter on the glass, limbs slip from their joints and skin dragged off the skeleton, screaming, crying. This is hiding from yourself, turning mirrors to face the wall. This is choking, this is fear. This is razor blades – not for the pain, not for death, this is the slicing of delicate skin in freezing cold showers, flipping the temperature all the way around, this is screaming at the singeing of blood, needles of flame probing open wounds. This is grounding. This is real. This is the daily game. This is walking through crowded hallways without a sound. This is the inability to make a sound. This is seeing someone you had loved catch you out of the corner of their eye and turn in the opposite direction. This is holding yourself like they did. This is crying in bed, world spinning, lungs sore, trying to find a pulse somewhere on your body worth holding onto. This is finding old pictures of you two together, this is forgetting how to breathe. This is being unable to remember a time where he’d smile at you or just look at you; his smile is foreign, his eyes seemed fabricated, you had forgotten what color they were. This is wondering where those pictures came from. This is wondering if you just made it all up. This is identity. This is disappearance. This is solubility. This is uncertainty. This is wondering whose body you stole. This is loneliness. This is unreal. This is party crashing everyone’s lives. This is forgetting your name. This is forgetting where you live. This is forgetting. This is failing classes, this is cheating just to get by, hands painted with ink and test answers, drawing on your hand and arms just to normalize the idea of words being written on your palm – hiding in plain sight, this is crying when you can’t understand. This is crying when no one else understands. This is crying because of who you are. This is crying because you don’t know if you are. Where are you? Are you here? Where are you going? This is getting dragged under. This is swallowing more water than tears you’ve shed. This is sinking. This is a body crumpling into nothing. This is a carcass, this is a mold, this is capture. This doesn’t make sense to anyone. This doesn’t make sense to you. This is cutting for the sensation. This is hiding in your closet – no mirrors in the closet. This is never taking pictures of yourself. This is running to get away from a school assembly because you can feel yourself dissolving into wall paint around all the people who won’t miss you. This is unreal, surreal. This is trying to tear the skin off your neck to breathe because your throat is caught on someone else’s voice. This is unreal. This is tears in your carpet, this is unreal, this is therapy. This is unreal, this is watching, deteriorating, this is unreal. This is “It’s not getting better, is it? This thing you have?”. This is “No, it’s not,” because this is unreal; At least, you hope it is because this is unreal, depersonalized.