Hands Wrapped Around My Neck Squeeze Tighter. I Wonder If This Is How I Will Die. My Eyes Bulge But I

I had abandoned all intelligence seeing as it got the world nowhere. Maybe in a good world, with good people, advancements would forward us and make us more humane, lessen suffering, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and so on.

But put knowledge in the hands of a brute and he grows ever crueler.

Oh, I feel warm. I feel warm like the sun even in the darkest of rooms. I am me again.

In another world, I am strong. And withstanding, and sure of myself. I pray she’s well, for I certainly am not.

These teeth of mine, that I press my tongue against, will outlast my soul. I taste death, how when I die, my crooked jaw will linger here on this earth without me. It haunts me to smile and see a glimpse of what will remain.

That is what they don’t understand. They think some external pressure is destroying me but it has always been myself. Only my finger tips know where on my belly is tender and bruised enough to burrow into.

How pathetic. To spend my days reassuring myself that they are not wasted, all the while wasting them in trivial debates with the wretched thing in the mirror about the very topic. Why I should answer to her, I do not know. She is the opposite of me. Her left eye is where my right is, and her right eye is where my left is. Her hair is parted on the wrong side, her college chosen wrong, her days spent mindlessly, her work set to waste, what a rotten thing she is. I know who I am. And it isn't her. It can't be. Or every poor thing I think of myself would be true.

I’ve whittled myself down,

Suckled myself to nothing like a cough drop in a cheek,

And all I have to show for this betrayal, is a familiar flavor in my mouth to mull over as the adults speak.

And I am content to keep hurting. I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing.

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.

Would you burn the olive trees if you grew them, if you felt their bark wind under your fingertips like locks of hair? Would you poison the water if it quenched your thirst, if you let the river stones touch your sole? You claim the land is yours, and you’re owed every grain of its sand but someone who loves the land would not demolish its beauty so recklessly. If that is how you treat what is yours, I dread the fate of those you call others.