I am uncomfortable. It feels like the very bones in my body are revolting themselves. My stomach is tied in knots, my head is pounding and my heart feels so heavy that it seems to be collapsing my chest. Oh, what a horrific war it is when your instincts battle your beliefs and you are forced to be the battleground.

I feel a warm, rotting coldness in my gut. It feels like a corpse in a coffin. I feel like a funeral, a morgue, a tragedy.

The problem is, I don’t seem to feel anything. Not anymore. My emotions are numb, like they have been submerged into an ice bath and have not yet been lifted out. I want to feel sad, I want to feel depressed and get over it; but I feel nothing.

I feel nothing. Just this corpse in my chest and this pounding elation in my head and this urge to feel but not feeling.

It has been five years.
It has been five years.
Half a decade. Five out of seventeen years of my life, this addiction has been a part of me.

Because for as long as I have had this addiction I have been haunted by the event, the moment I went from innocence to lust and I regret it.

My body now hungers for something I do not want. I am saying no to myself and myself isn’t listening, my hunger is molesting me.

This is what it does. It excites you, makes you want it before you understand what it is, and then when you do it has cornered you. It has played its game and you are now its pawn and you cannot escape. It twists you around like a puppet on strings, twirling you across its stage and making you intimate with every niche of its addiction. And then the sadness comes. It comes in waves and washes the strings out and for a time you are safe. You are allowed to drown yourself, to float through an abyss that expects nothing of you. But then the tide turns and it retreats again and the addiction makes sure to chomp down any ground its lost, and gains more. You return to your strings and continue to dance in a jiggling dangling fashion and it continues.

Finally, you cut the stings, shorten them a bit and it loses a bit of its grip but overall it just holds you closer to itself with the shorter strings and you are left with a numbness similar to when you are held too tight. Too tight.

That is addiction, you become entangled in a thing that you don’t want. An urge that attaches itself to you like a spider web and softly encroaches on yourself. Makes its way into your hearth and home and shuts out the fire. Smothers it, till the room grows cold and there is nothing left. No heat, no flame, no spark, nothing. Just ash and ash and ash and memories because that is all ash is, memories. The leftovers of the flame, the leftovers of the life you had before it all turned gray and oh what a horrible bitter thing it is. It is forced to be consumed down your throat and coats and coats with its gray coat and you become a gray thing, an ashy flake.

That is all I feel right now.
That is all I am, for a time.
I do not feel anything else.
It’s true that from dust man rose and to dust man returns.
I just never thought I would return to my origins like this.