The Stolen Whole. in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

You stole things from me.

So soundlessly subtly, so slowly, I never took the time to even realise your crime; and in shadows where I couldn’t see, you slipped shiftless palms into my pockets, and stole my personality.

You stole the passions and pleasures, the person I was; the building-block bric-a-brac that made me myself. The reader and rambler and writer, the artist and rocker and rider; the person with ideas and interests and quirks. Complex, contradictory, unusual, unashamed; either you stole her, or I gave her away.

The punk-rock girl buckled into stomping black boots, wearing rainbows of bracelets in stacks up both arms, playing kiss-chase with boys across the beer-sticky dancefloors of dirty dive clubs. The girl with horizons as wide as her eyes; exhilarated, excited, freefalling into friendships and feelings and life. Who laughed with her head back until her ribs ached, who walked miles through soft-sunlit summers built of woodlands and lakes, who devoured history and watched horses race, in enthralled appreciation of their rhythmic-patterned paces and fluid liquid grace.

She sketched with her words and wrote poems in paint, collected knowledge like seashells and read to discover; she thought in diagonals and lived in dimensions, revelled in excelling and outstripped expectations. She never took photographs, because she could say with the firm faith of youth that it would always be this way; her head was full of colour because she lived it every day.

I wish I had photographs, now, just to prove she existed; just to prove I was something before I was you.

I cut her to pieces and carved up my life; controlled-calorie portions plated up on a platter of self-loathing sauce, I choke on the servings like swallowing a noose. Everything I’ve achieved since the age of eighteen can be measured and summarised in inches and pounds, sliced into fractions and quantified; the endless quest for emptiness leaves nothing else inside. So it isn’t surprising that now I weigh less, because now I am hollow, a void, an abyss.

All those endless thoughts about killing myself; and I never even realised I have already done it.