Words I read burn through my retinas and singe my heart like chapped lips, pale and sore, my mind racing over every slight feeling; the twitching of my fingers and unusually high heart rate and the occasional flash behind my eyelids from something like a seizure. Rolls of nausea like waves of a muddy river seep high in my stomach, deep in my throat, threatening and taunting, and yet all so subtle compared to the fiery cold that tingles through my arms and legs. (It’s one a.m. and I…)

Stone feathers etched around a heart with sepia in its veins, a clutter and a mess that cannot be organized. A jungle of glitter and scissors and wax paper, clocks and lamps and dolls, they all stare down at me, so many pairs of eyes that vary; piercing, soft, large, small, uneven, tormented…demented. (It burns…)

The dead skin begins to peel, pull away, rip the new skin and make it bleed; cracked and dry and thirsting for something it can’t have. (There has to be more)…But all the tin foil hearts and paper umbrellas and bottle collections just sit there and gather dust, mocking me, for I know that they have something I don’t. (Why…)

Sometimes I wish I was addicted to caffeine as an excuse for the headaches I get. Stumbling to sleep on nothing but a mattress on the floor is what I call home, my body twitching and yet I don’t know why; my mind is so awake. The soft glow of fake candles can’t lull me to the morbid fantasies of my dreams, no. Neither can the soft ticking of the clock or the mindless cartoons that play on late night television…(I can’t stand the silence anymore…)

What a complicated mess the human mind must be; so many synapses and chemical reactions and nerve cells all jumbled together, intertwined so messily but somehow in this complex organization. (But why does the mind have to have a heart…)  I’ve found myself addicted to Vaseline, and I can’t go hours without it; but now I have not a trace, with chapped lips I stare at the ceiling and pray that there are cracked lips and cracked eye lids and cracked hands and cracked bodies and cracked hearts out there staring at their ceilings and craving addictions that don’t exist and marveling at useless clutter and can’t sleep because their minds are so vigilant and notice every beat of their heart, wondering if it will ever

(Stop.)