I am a tangle of wild keyed up emotion that roars beneath my skin.

You could be forgiven for thinking restraints held me down as I sit here in the dark,
for thinking I was strapped into this chair.

Nails digging into --

flesh

-- the wood of the armrests.

Muscles straining and perfectly still.

If I don’t move, maybe it will quiet.

If I don’t move, maybe it will leave me alone;

No longer lashing into my brain,

Self-flagellation demanding more,

Harder, faster, more

More pain to feed the craving for escape, to punish for the regrets and failure, to show that there is striving, progress, as I strain to be else.

Maybe if I hold still this need for pain, punishment, this urgent desire to outpace myself will rest.

It is louder than my own thoughts, but not the ragged breaths pulled from my chest when I have exhausted my own ability to tear one step further down the street

I wish I could tear a hole in the fabric of the world and disappear somewhere new, somewhere the hornets’ nest of my own thoughts would be unable to follow me.