I closed my eyes and tried to lift my heart back up, as every day it sank lower, threatening to invade my womb. It was a horrid feeling, one I couldn’t quite put into words, but I knew it had been growing. I had a vague sense of how it started, but as the days went by, the feeling became more undefinable, morphing into shapes and forms that were beyond description. It doodled inside my flesh, like a blade cutting through the emptiness inside me. I thought about this feeling obsessively—passionately, as my friend would say. I read about it, wrote about it, shaped my existence around it until it consumed me, inside and out. It began to feed on my appearance, bleeding into my eyes, hunching my back, and crippling my toes.
I thought it had always been there, even in my childhood, but I couldn’t see it. It was just a tiny mole in my heart, and over the years, it had festered and burned. It leeched onto the joy that was left, eating away at every moment.
If this was going to be forever, I often thought that I would not have enough will to stomach it, that I couldn’t suppress it much longer. I was terrified of the future, fearing this feeling would have taken up everything, and I wouldn’t be able to carry it. I told myself to live one day at a time, but the days were moving so fast. My body was blurring out of reality, and I imagined this is what growing up must feel like. Everyone else seemed to be doing so well, yet I could barely crawl out of bed.
Then I feared, and feared, and I hid from the future. I turned my back from everything that was possible and missed out on every beautiful thing. Had anyone told me that this thing was fleeting, that this rogue emotion inside me wouldn’t be there forever, maybe…just maybe I would have lived.
Comments