Escapism (give me space)

Trigger Warning: description and depiction of dissociative episodes

Flush out all emotion as if discarding a toy. Rid yourself of hell, burdening hell, take this sacrifice and shed it, it is no longer yours. It is no longer needed. Without it, you are free. You are an angel, cutting away your ability to fly. These so-called gifts are burdens, and somehow you may be the only one who understands. Forget, forgive, buckle and scrape it off. Bury whatever you may possess like a body in the backyard.

Detach your mind from your body as if you’d been inhabited by a ghost, a ghost to carry burdens and chase away demons. Your vessel, empty and hollow, becomes the perfect nesting ground for something unrecognizable, its taste for the tormented serves it well here. Meanwhile you’re somewhere else, laughing to your friends and drinking sweet tea on a porch you haven’t seen in fifteen years. Laugh to yourself with a mouth full of glass and pretend you can only taste something sweet. Lime, licorice, cherry punch.

Escape until the stranger in the mirror becomes a painting. Your body is only experiencing every sensation momentarily, they’ll all fade away soon. You grab a table and miss the surface, your hands slipping, and it is then you fall beyond the earth. It is then you know what you are; a bundle of atoms. Atoms broken and scattered across the universe, tied together with loose string. Your hands are made of atoms, pulverized galaxies, fake pieces of earth laying the palm of your hand.

Draw a world made entirely of thought. This is now your sanctum, it’s carved out of space and time. It’s made of all of your tiny indulgences, horrific and unsightly and oh so sickeningly sweet. Hide it far away in the back of your skull where no one can find it, where every tower you’ve built leaks ichor and the rivers are made of gold. The outside world is optional, so keep building until you’re done. Keep building until your towers reach high enough to let you coast high above everyone else, observing the environment instead of bearing it.

Eradicate all together as if it did you wrong. It’s killing you, you tear it from your skin and leave it for dead like , you only have so much that keeps you alive. (It will surface some day, with claws that desecrate the earth, and it will tear you asunder, but today, it hides in your closet, like a dog asleep.)