With delicate, yet awkward, fingers
I edge my way down my throat
And loosen the cut you made on my neck.
Nails crawl through my flesh
until I hear the strum of my failing violin, cat gut, vocal chords.
An ear drum bursting TWANG;
Reminiscent of the s c r e a m s
You forced from my bones.

My body twists around the thought of your
Gaze pounding down my spine.
You’ve buried your way into my skin,
A burdensome parasite I can’t shake, or dig out.
Despite the number of nails I break
And bones I dislocate.

Maybe I’m just empty space...
Crawling... dissipating.
Sinking into this nameless,
Faceless, loveless,
Human afterthought.

You and I.
You. And I am damaged.
I’ll rip myself apart and scrape the dust together,
Maybe I’ll build myself from the ashes...
Or maybe the wind will tear through this canyon again.
I live in a depth you don’t want to understand.
You and I.
You.
You don’t say you love me anymore.

Positive thoughts are packaged with depressing discouraging chants in a plastic punnet.
I don’t know how to cope with that...
So to satisfy the thirst of my ever dangling drought of accomplishment,
I jam the thoughts in a blender on top speed.
Wait for the deafening swirl of the blades to stop,
And I lap up the monotonously foul “you are going no where’s”
With the chewy chunks of “you got out of bed, welldone’s”,
Slump back into a rotting pine chair,
And I glide through the emptiness.

You never made me happy.
Though you heard me say it, you never made me happy; not once... not ever.
Instead what you heard was falsities...
A lie, a mask, a good ******* play at ‘happy families’.
You never made me happy.
I lived in a bubble of illness and not the kind I could see a doctor for.  
I painted masks across my face for you, sung a sweet lullaby of ‘I’m peaceful in this second’.
But in that second you were suffocating me, boxing me, moulding me, caging, controlling,
Ensuring I wouldn’t leave.
An exuberant ‘I’m happy’ should’ve translated more appropriately to ‘I want to die and be reborn’.
You made me sick and I wanted to die.

My life is like quicksand,
I continuously sink slowly,
Kick and drag myself up high enough just to gulp at air.
Then follows the slow descent.
I'm unsure of what's at the bottom
But my toes have tickled it a few times
Then the beast bellows and laughs,
Sending tsunami waves through the sand;
I roll like a ship about to be taken under by fierce swell.

Sometimes I think the quicksand is encased in my skull...
Sometimes I think the depths of the quicksand settle on the top of my spinal cord.
Sometimes I think I'm numb from the corrosive vibrations of the sludgy water-sand mix:
Jamming my nervous system, rusting it over.

But then the memory of pressure of your hand around my neck
Makes me forget the metaphor of the sand
And the make-believe depression.
And the blood in my nose, that drips and drys and repeats itself daily
Exists because you forced my head against the wall so many times.
Razors are not a comfort they are a fear and I still cough them up from my lungs.

I realise you are not terrifying
I realise that you do not own my life
You do not decide that I am real or fake or suffering.
I realise that you are only a scar
That I am slathering oils and remedies over
In order to make the red fade.
I realise that I am so *******
H A P P Y

One year on;
And I have overcome your disease,
Dislodged your putrid fangs,
Rebuilt myself,
Healed, cured myself...
Found a real person
Who knows how to love me
And teach me to love me.