People never know how low you can sink, how deep into the rabbit hole you can drop. Madness picks you up.
Madness is a weird thing.
It's a process. It's so small at first, so undetectable, that no one realizes what is happening until it is too late.
Once it happens, there is no going back.
But the descent is slow. It takes little bits of you everyday, every time someone or something hurt you.
Chip, chip, chip.
Like workers in a mine, chipping at the ground to find gold.
But there is no gold to be found in destruction.
There is only sadness, anger and despair. Despair leads the way to madness. Despair has no remorse, no boundaries. Despair will crush you down and won't stop. Despair leads you down and with it tumbles other feelings, incomprehension, frustration, desires, love, hate, they all follow you down and form this clumps of horrors you can't get out of. They keep you from breathing, speaking, hearing anything but your own despair.
And maybe you can't feel yourself change, but you do.
Slowly.
What once made you smile makes you smirk.
What once made you upset makes you smile.
Despair drills a hole in you body and, from it, everything that makes you you tumbles down and your body doesn't host a human anymore. It hosts a terrible thing. A shell of a human being with nothing left to lose. And that is the worst that can happen to anyone.
If there is no hope, no feelings, nothing, you become a danger.
There is nothing you wouldn't do.
Insanity doesn't destroy you.
It destroys everything around you.
Those who loved you one, those who cross your path. Anyone in contact with you loses a piece of themselves.
A hopeless person is a slow bomb. Its detonation is silent and lasts a long time, hurting hundreds of people.
Then, one day, it's over.
What if we could detect madness and cure it? I imagine a little goes a long way with madness.
I imagine a little love and care can solve the problem. Love is hope. Care shows importance. And if you matter, you don't get desperate.
I hope I never get desperate. I think, maybe, my family is keeping me sane. I would go insane without them. They are my hope. They show me I matter when no one else does.
But that isn't despair.
It's extreme, excruciating loneliness.
It hurts in your whole body, hurts on a cellular level. I think… it may be the worst kind of pain, when no one chooses to love you. Not because they are your family and feel the need to love you because you share blood. But because they think you are worth it.
I am not worth anyone's love.
And that is.
Just.
So.
****.
Painful.
My skin is one fire and I just stand there, burning alive forever.
But I am willing to burn forever more if it means I get to drown in hope one day.