i. I never knew four letters could melt menthol candy-like, hydrochloric acid on my tongue and keep burning it in different degrees I had to swallow back.
ii. That there would come a time I'd have to baptize the pain in my chest like seasons robbing me lungfuls on January, September and December nights.
iii. That my blood was really ink I needed to stop using before my skin turned paper-like.
iv. That my heart had an epicenter pumping a magnitude of earthquakes that made me tremble helplessly in its intensity; and that they were man-made calamities followed by harsh, heavy, whipping tsunamis to flood my grave of bleeding, jagged fault lines.
v. That aftereffects lasted longer than treatment itself, and that I didn't need any professional diagnosis to know I was terminal from the same drug that made butterfly-strokes in my veins, whose arms withheld the only elixir to this malady.
vi. I named my sickness, my pain, my agony like orphaned children, after you-- a rare disease the doctors didn't even know about yet.
vii. I did and I doubted but a part of me beat signals that echoed off the cave walls of my skull that I knew.
viii. Before everything, I have been warned but I chose to listen to the soothing, wrong, hopeful voices "He means no harm,".
ix. You began spreading like an epidemic-- a tumor to a colony of cells all over me-- until I became you; a reflection of familiar suffering and mortality, slowly withering away. In the end, I didn't even have you to blame for letting me overdose from intakes of my own ****, bitter medicine and unforgivable mistakes.
x. I guess, this was how you wanted the price to be paid.