My internal landscape was once a wetland. Grasses and herbaceous plants sprout from the ventricles of my heart. My rib is a birch tree, a deciduous hard wood crowned with thin leaves. My veins are wild ravines. Inside it is the torrent of rain water that keeps me alive.

My heart is a beating water lily, eternally blooming on the lake of my blood. I was a sullen mist, and I loved it that way.

But they mistook my solitude for loneliness, the crowd, the clever engineers. So they loaded sands on their trucks, sacks after sacks. They opened me up, covered my wetland, and built a city inside me. They paved roads. They constructed buildings. They opened cafes and pubs and restaurants. They turned on their neon lights.

A rave party is inside me at night, and they won't stop until I am filled with cigarette stubs and empty bottles and used issues and half-eaten plates -- litters and grime that I have to clean every morning of my life. My gutter is overflowing and they call this happiness.

I call this wreckage.

I moved close to the bed, pulled the sheet and laid down. I tried to remember my by-gone world -- my birch trees, my herbaceous plants, my wild ravines, my water lily -- before I was converted into a rattling shell called Happiness.

You wrapped your arms around me and press your face on small of my back. My spine was a hard wood once, and every October it shed its golden leaves. "What do you want?" you asked.

The neon lights and the avalanche of noise from everywhere drowned my thoughts, and all I can do for my defense is curl my mutiliated body.  "Love me until the end of everything," I whispered. "And understand that this is not a plea."

This is a burning desire to have my wetland back.