"I need to protect you from yourself"

Every breath feels like the one before a dive. 

I clutch my skin, I can feel something growling again. There's a muzzle with rows of teeth, something snarling again. 

Some kind of... anger? Hatred? An emotion I've sworn since childhood to never act upon. I have the tools to make a fire, but I'm scared of the shadows that I'll see in its light. 

The year collapses at my feet with wounds so deep I can see its creator. All the hidden compartments that look so gorgeous from this shitty orange lighting, blood and bone that have governed each of the millions of heavy steps I've taken. 

I have loved and lost, loved and gained and hurt and the heart doesn't beat well anymore, the number of times it's been ripped out and shoved back into the chest. Now I have learned that I don't find love, I find alters. I create immortal ideas out of men, consume every fiber of their being to mesh a world that I can live in. Those men were my oxygen tanks, and I suppose this makes me a patient that never really left the hospital bed all those years ago. 

Weakness tears apart everything about me. Every inch of my body is writhing, there are so many carnivores in the cavities of my bones, muscles and veins. 

A man who I once held like a delicate artifact, caressed like the son of God, praised and kissed... I understand where his offerings went to. Not to my wellbeing but to the nourishment of his own pleasures. I wasn't enough, my body wasn't enough, because I could never be his sun. 

Mere mortals cannot love an eclipse, cannot make love with it, a force so opposing it chances the sacred routine of living. 

His self destructive habits seeped into my own waterways. I let time carry me down the river, I was too tired to swim, anyway. And as every voice in my waking life had told me, my trust was placed onto the wrong person. 

The person he desired for is not in this body. Did he expect me to lay without a fight, without using my teeth? There is no heartbeat by the rhythmic rumbled of a tired dog, there are barred fangs and a choke, there was never a woman, there was an actor. 

Soon I'll be away from this asylum of a campus. Soon I'll have shed another year of my life. 

I want to build a different house.

The one I live in, is rotting.

This house has a weak foundation.

The roof is caving in. 

I can't live here anymore. 

I can't live like this. 

Nobody can live in this house. 

"So when will you change, after begging yourself to for months? You say you want to but nothing happens. Maybe you like the misery and filth. Are you so afraid of changing for the better? Is this who you want to be? Is this the body you'll settle for? "

I can't be like this forever. 

"You've been saying that for 8 years now. 8 years of wanting and waiting. And where has that gotten you? You've wanted the same thing - death. Well now, there you have it. This is death. Looping suffering every single day, doing nothing but wanting everything to happen. You are dead. The world is your grave. You might as well be living taxidermy"

What am I, if all I live for is death?

"Extinct."