Open Up Your Wrists - Paint Me as You See Me

 I found the following small diary entry left as torn pages beside the bathroom sink the day I lost him. The only blood on them was due to runoff from where they placed the razor blade at the edge of one of the pages. A body wasn't left behind, but a man-sized divet in the dirtied white bathroom tile. Inside was a steaming pile of scrunched-up skin, like a discarded used towel. No bones, organs, blood, hair, nothing; just the skin and steam that reeked of something I can only describe as primordial dust fragments burning between exploding molecules in space. At least that's the image that immediately exploded in my mind upon encountering the steam; the dust fragments sizzling and colliding together to form impossible geometrical shapes that always dispersed into nothingness just before anything identifiable took root. All that was left of my love was a pile of knotted flesh, slits with jagged edges running down their emptied tubes for arms, strange cosmic steam, and the words written in what seemed like a mockery of their handwriting in the pages below. 

    December 14th, 2023

    There's nothing left in my head. My head that continually rings out with wind whistling sickly through the growing hollowness spreading thoroughly across the plagued, dull, and increasingly ill semblance of my shadowed existence. Even after expending all possible effort my ailing brain could muster in order to convince myself that there really are certain things worth living for, I simply can not believe in any of it. Nothing leaves a lasting mark on my lack of will to live, outside, of course, of the multiplying assemblage of scar tissue crisscrossing up and down different sections of my left arm. Each one appearing to me as a forward invitation, an increasingly loud beckoning, and a series of challenges with the set goal of driving me further into worsening self-mutilation. How much deeper can I cut? How much more blood can I manage to make flow? Will I ever cease to feel as I continue to slash away each and every night? At the end of it all, whatever infinitesimal fragments of humanity I have left will surely be shed behind in ugly, rotten heaps. Something hideous and utterly inhuman would eek its way out, a vaporous vacuous formless shadow with no purpose other than spreading malignancy and despair in its useless wake. 

IT'S ALL THE

SAME.

The ritualized usage of my blood and torn-up flesh always leads to the same old thoughts. Whether or not I'm staring deep into the disgusting reflective glass projecting a series of exaggerations of every single WRONG aspect of my physical form, or if I'm coiled in the all-consuming darkness of my lonely little room; bleeding all over my clothes, bedsheets, notebooks, and gnawed-at fingers, gazing into my rising network of veins, examining the current process of scabs developing over the previous night's exercises in lacerations, targeting an untapped section of flesh, my thoughts will always unceasingly return, each and every time, to her. Her and the maligned series of events that led me to where I am now. It echoes in my head, in between flashes of her crying eyes and strange sensations of blood clotting in my arm; 

"EVERYTHING IS 

USELESS,

NOTHING LASTS

AT 

ALL."

If only she could see me now. Stripping the silence away. Opening my veins and injecting the distance she forced between us in place of my blood until my ligaments distort and pop, I dissolve into the polluted pool of my tears, and come out reborn in the noxious, hateful light of how she sees me.