2. mind-struggles

I imagine terrible things. My therapist at the hospital told me to stop watching the news. That being said, I haven't, in months. I don't know what's going on. I can't. I went to check the weather on a website, and when I found out that a seven year old boy had been attacked by a dog, I spent an honest half hour sobbing.

My mind is not dead. It is, however, maimed.

I see people walking down the street and I predict their future. This boy will fall in love with his high school sweetheart. They will have a bastard baby. With the trials of becoming parents, they will begin to argue. Over time, they grow apart, and by the time the child is four, they break apart completely. The mother runs off. The father raises said baby, but when they age to eleven, they die in a fatal car crash. The father has nothing. He hangs himself three months after his child's funeral service. He's cremated. Nobody collects his ashes.

I'm sick and the worst part about being sick is that everyone knows you're sick. I say the most horrible things and disguise them with sarcasm so that people will laugh and push it aside as a joke. It works. Nobody has called me out on it.

How would they not know, though? Doctor appointments left and right. Missing a week of school. A row of scars on both of my forearms. How could they not know? As if it wasn't bad enough, when I was presenting to my class, my hand began to shake.

When I say, "my hands shake when I am scared," I mean exactly that. They shake. Not trembling. It isn't slight. They shake. I sat through my final, speaking and making eye contact, while my hands danced along in light of their own show.

Everybody noticed. Nobody had the heart to say anything.

I break my own heart. I lay in bed for hours, watching the clock tick by. The other day, I began punching myself and I couldn't stop. I hate this body. I hate the soul which occupies it.

I stopped when my arms no longer wished to move. The next day, I didn't look my bruises in the eye.

I am self-destructive, and these days, I'm being reconstructed. I am both the tornado and the town. I'm fighting life in a best two out of three round. One of us is going down.