something cold and lifeless

      Act quickly and breathe quality, take shallow breaths of air as you know the last seconds are over. Let your warm tears fall freely down the chin and into the mouth, taste the salt on your tongue. Taste the taste of all that has encompassed you and mix it with the copper concoction that has escaped time and time again, like a jar with holes, the body is a jar with man-made holes and doorways. Doorways leading to moving pipes and soft hallways that footsteps rarely echo. The atmosphere of that room was never enough pressure to stop the coughing, never enough to collapse the lungs. I am an astronaut on the worsts loneliest planet. My spaceship has been abducted by a life form that looks like me, but cries less and kills more. 

      No more room for talking thought it, said I, and I alone will solve all my problems through the force of sharp teeth and muscle. Doppelgänger but the fat is distributed in the right places, the shoulders are lean and the posture is one of a born fighter, one of the chosen. A body that wasn’t bred for life, but for war. Perhaps my own body is a war with life. I am the general of a crippled army twice defeated and my malnourished self sunken into whatever seat I inhabited at the table. It’s a battle I have no chance of winning if I keep hurting myself in the process. “An eye for an eye will leave us blind”. 

      I drink out of empty bottles. My ears have yet to hear words that heal me. Only syllables that are coated in false forgiveness. I wanted so bad to be held by God, but the closest I got to was your arms. 

      Now that everyone is gone I don’t know who to turn to but my bedsheets for warmth. 

        Put the metal up to my temple, and wish for one last kiss, even if from death. Reciting prayers on your skin. Even for a moment letting my hand rest against your face, the ear against the chest, to mimic the normalcy of human connection. To pretend that I am alive again. The underbelly of love is full of scars, both self inflicted and of the other. To seduce death until it becomes unrecognizable from a lover. Leave sigils into the skin, a promise that never breaks, and a sleep that never ends. 

      I feel something growing inside of me. A rock in my stomach, a pit in my chest. We might have the same matching eyes but you could never see what I see. I think this house I live in, everyone is going insane, slowly. The innards are tearing again and the stale hospital smell carries through the kitchen, burns my nose. It’s a hurt in my stomach, in my hands and wrist. It’s the faux leather, the burnt candles and whatever else I attempt to make my room less and less a confinement.