This useless meat sack. I am the thing watching behind the eyes of this empty meat sack. I am the one piloting this sausage of a body, directing it to walk, talk, smile.
Sometimes I wish that I could reach into my chest and tear it open. I want to rip and tear and slice past the epidermis, watch the white fatty cells and veins and arteries moving. I want to see white, bone-white, a cage for my useless heart. Watch my heart pump like those sheep hearts we used to dissect in science. I remember how they looked, white fat clinging like ivy, and greying in the cool room of the labs. Nothing but a cold, clammy lump of flesh. Maybe death smells like the butchers. Like bleach that can’t cover the festering smell of rot and ammonia.
I’m heavy on my ankles. I remember the last time I starved, and I felt as if I could fly, balanced on my tip-toes, poised to fall. And maybe falling felt just as good.
It’s so unbearably soft. My chest, my arms. I can feel my cheek meat. Fat on bones. Scrape it out with a spoon like pork cheeks, soft, tender, delicious.
A chrysalis. A cut-out, a hollow man wearing hollow shoes doing hollow things. How did that pupa feel, I wonder, trapped in darkness? No way out but forward. The growing pains, tendons and bones and muscles warping. Twisting and crawling but transforming, little by little. Into what, you can’t possibly imagine. The uncertainty, it’s almost as bad as the darkness. No change even when you open your eyes, like colours have frozen into little dizzying pixels. You can’t stop, but do you want to? On the precipice between weakness and a terrifying something else, what can you be but monstrous? Not one or the other but neither.
What are you turning into? A butterfly? A monster? Neither?
You can’t stop.