I Take This Body Out to Die

The night I realised that the distance between my body, and what was left of my entrapped soul, was the sum of everything I was told I could never be, I lay on my bathroom floor and cried. It was also the night I learned that only 1 in 25 suicide attempts succeed. I was 19, and had never been kissed.

Since that day, I have died many times, waiting for this body to finally feel like my own— this body that never seems to reach its quota of cheap gin and tears and cum and spit and blood— this body I have starved and purged and sliced and burnt till I forgot where I ended and the pain began.

Sometimes, when the pain has leaked onto the floor and it takes me longer than a cup of coffee and a cigarette to remember that I was once beautiful, I am reminded that this body resides in time’s jurisdiction, and this hurt will have to end one day. There will come a DM then, or a glance held too firmly, for too long. That is all it will take for this body to forget it knows anything other than the word yes.

I drag myself to the pyre, and give this body that used to be my body, to a new set of calloused hands and a mouth that does not know the meaning of stop or please. A thousand little deaths follow every moan, witnessed without mourning, under eyes and chests that do not see me and barely feel me.

When they are gone and the bed is cold, I pray— that each death will awaken something, anything, within me.

I Do Not Feel Like a Survivor

Whispers from gentle lovers
Why do you cry, when I touch you?
Plague me.