Not Designed For Life. in And The Rest.

Strength and weakness are intrinsically entwined, unhappily married in a twisted tree-root entanglement of shadow and light, I don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

Walking the precipice with faltering footfalls, tripping the tightrope on tiptoes over trenches and trapwires, it takes all of me. Every day drains me to nothing, exhaustion a radiation reverberating rotten through the shell of my bones, the marrow toxic and heavy, turned to lead with the effort of carrying my head. Every day ruins me, dressing up saccharine in sickly sugar-frosting to cover the holes, a painstaking pastiche of lies and smiles pinned together with gritted teeth.

Living is a backstreet boxing ring, a dogfight, dirty and debauched, all teeth and claws strobe-lit in scarlet. Violence and violation in concentric circles, everything is hard-fought, scrambling sordid in gravel gutters on battered knees and bloody palms, swallowing thick sour-syrup air. Barely kept upright by the sharp-snapping jaws of other people’s emotions at my ankles and the noose of my own bribes, a choke-chain at my throat pulling me forward.

There’s something wrong with me, I’m flawed and faulty, too brittle, too easily broken. Everything is too close to the surface, my heart beats convulsive febrile shivers in the palm of my hand and the raw string twines of my nerves twist exposed around my limbs in creeping ivy curls.

The mirror monster bedecked in barbed-wire brambles salivates at my shortcomings, lashing frantic, shattering the glass in splinter showers, every shard stabs a stripped, naked nerve. I can’t stand it, I’m always too close to the edge, I am gossamer cobwebs on the wind, already torn in holes and translucent.

Strung out and shaky, it all feels so flimsy, feet slipping and sliding on fractured foundations. The faces of everyone I know line up eyeless and blank in a paper-doll garland and I recoil flinching and wary, afraid of their drifting razor edges. Afraid that the petty papercut skin-split from an unchecked sharp tongue, a thoughtless gesture, a misplaced shrug, may never stop bleeding. The smallest slight scores scars deep into me, draining me lifeless beneath the surface, emotional haemophilia.

Life is too loud, too brash, too harsh, too dark. Too much. Everything is filmy fractions from being too much, I am fraught and fragmented from fighting all the time and it makes me sick with abasement, embarrassment, at my own overexposed emotions. It is not supposed to be like this, coping is not supposed to feel like combat, like carnage, the truth wraps angry frustrated fingers of slimy seaweed shame around my neck. I try to palm myself off with those prettily-parcelled little lies, that I am being strong by struggling, by surviving; it’s just a confection of fiction and fantasy, it’s all fucking fake.

Really I am just weak; pathetically, disgustingly, inhumanly weak, because dragging myself through daylight should not take everything I have.