Lungs pushed until even breathing is too hard, my mind reels. But that’s normal.
The obsidian monster swirls in my thoughts and consumes everything, until I give in to the feeling of loss that I’ve earned. I deserve it, I think.
It’s a square room of dread where I can’t see around or under anything, the walls are dark and foreboding.
It’s an inky whirlpool, one where swimming is impossible–I’m ****** down, down, down, into its unforgiving depths
It makes my heart fill with a weight so heavy, I think I’ll sink.
It pushes on my shoulders and propels me down until my ears pop from the pressure of the depths, and tells me it’s my fault I’m so deep. I scramble frantically for the surface, lungs screaming, head bursting, and reach it only just in time.
I wish I could wring the gloomy blackness out of me, like a towel, then cleanse it with bleach, make it white again, and try once more to wipe the darkness from my heart. My cloth is soiled with the sooty colors of mistrust, jealousy, and lost time.
I want to feel the darkness dripping off of me. I want to feel each droplet travel down the curves of my body like a stream of thousands of tiny snakes slithering, sliding. That is what I deserve.
I want to hear the drops of my sorrow hit the floor with a roar, and splash away into oblivion, the drips getting softer and softer as each one hits the ground, leaving me to hear nothing but my steady heartbeats and my unwavering breaths.
Yes! I want the onyx-colored pain to drain away into someone else’s space, into someone else’s time. I want it to defy gravity and go up, up, up, until only the stars can see it, and I am faced with it no more.
I want the twilight infused darkness to choose someone else. Choose someone who deserves it; I don’t want it to be mine.
I am forever stained a murky black.
I carry the stain with me, hidden. It threatens to take over me time and time again, in the most nuanced of ways.
Sometimes the shadows are felt in the spaces between typed letters, or it is exposed in the silence between spoken words. Sometimes it’s a moment captured in my memory, but all I can see is the shadows cast on irrelevant charcoal figures. Sometimes, it’s a picture. The darkness is there, right next to me.
The darkness refuses to recognize that it is not the victim. My darkness is naive, and it blames me. The wrongdoings are mine, and my darkness tells me so. It asks me why I don’t respond to its antagonism, but I stay silent.
The darkness fabricated stories of devotion, of caring, of kindness; and I believed it. It targeted my heart, my head, my soul.
It manipulated me, and it wounded me.
It singed my heart until it was black like coal, and all I can do is wonder why.