WORDS

Angst

tw: self harm

Panic bleeds sluggish through your veins. Your heart feels four times as big and your lungs four times as small. All you hear is the blood rushing through your ears, everything else muted. Your eyes tear up and you crumble.

You fall to the floor, bruising your knees again and you just stay there; hours, minutes, seconds. Time is endless. Your heart a relentless war drum.

You curl up into the smallest ball of human you can possibly comprehend yet you still feel like you're filling the entire room. Your thoughts crashing and rolling across the walls like waves, caving in on top of you, suffocating you. Yet you still try to desperately ignore the falling sensation in the pit of your gut that normally lasts a second or two.

It's been 1 minute and 48 seconds.

And it hasn't passed.

The burning in your heart, the throbbing behind your eyes, the shaking, the involuntary convulsing of your muscles.

It's lasted too long. You're dying, surely? You must be, it's never lasted this long. Your heart? It's failing. Your brain? It's shutting down. The fluttering pressure in your breast relentlessly rising, feigning and faulting. A full intake of breath seems like a galaxy away.

Then the sudden hand on your shoulder lurches you into a memory so painful it makes you scream. Your eyes screw shut and the streams of tears running down your cheeks seem endless, your throat tearing itself into shreds.

Breath even more evasive and your hands clenched in little fists, the nails cut flush in an attempt to prevent you from tearing your palms apart. With nothing, nothing to stop the onslaught of agony ripping through your mind. With no distractions, no diversions, nothing to keep the taunting black abyss at bay, you seek peace. A second. A sliver of fucking peace.

Because pain is the only distraction given to you, and you take what's given to you. you slam your fists into the ground, busting open your already ruined knuckles. You hit yourself in the head. You claw impossibly deep grooves into your arms with your trimmed, short nails as you fleetingly find the power to pull yourself together.

It ceases. Lungs heaving, you roll onto your side and face your best friend. Her tears streaming as much as yours, if not more so. Knowing she can do nothing to help heal the war wounds of your mind. The unforgiving pain that teases your eyelids as you try to sleep.

You will never beat the broken thoughts of your mind. You can only endure it.