a tear is a thread exposed

The heaving is arrogant and weeping is for narcissists. You are performing for your beige walls. You are not sad. You can stop yourself from crying, just watch yourself in the third person.

A tear is a thread exposed. When a thread is jutting out of its stitch, your knit is on the line. Unraveling is such sweet sorrow. My knit was in danger once too, and I immediately traded the danger for something much worse.

It’s why I’m here now.

Once upon a time, I walked through a forest and stole tomatoes from the witch's garden. I was hungry, and I didn't know that I hated tomatoes, but the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made them sound ravishingly delicious. The red color evoked a craving, and I wanted to behold them.

I remember it so clearly: I was running out of the garden, tomatoes piled high on my forearms. Suddenly, the vines sprang from the ground and wrapped around my ankle. These small, imperceptible leeches sprung from their stalks and seeped into the cracks of my skin, all up along my calves.

Oh, how I wept and wept and wept!

I first tasted tomatoes when I fell on one and mashed it to pieces with my face.

I hate the texture, it reminds me of skin and muscle.

As the leeches burrowed into each pore and made it home (set up their TV and their decorative paintings, bought a vacuum and a rug, and ate the walls of my hair follicles as sustenance), I wept hard and from my belly.

Each pore expanded and my calves looked polka-dotted as they munched to the bone.

At the height of my agonized wails, the witch finally approached with very soft, padded feet. She crouched down and leaned into my face, her wild hair reaching for me. Her mahogany gnarled hands slowly hovered over my cheeks. Just then a tear, still attached to my eye, tumbled down. She plucked it from my duct before its trail could be broken.

She plucked the tear and she pulled.

My eye rolled to the back of my head like a ball of yarn.

My wails turned into screams as the tear-thread was tugged on harder.

and my lips caved in, taking with it the rest of my skin and hair

My teeth popped out and my tongue wagged, a concave hole where my mouth should be

My head turned inside out and the spool of tear turned into viscera, red, blue, purple, and white!

Stark white!

Until my eyelashes beat against the crook of my skin! Until my trachea and my rib cage finally felt air!

it is odd to breathe against your own neck.

The witch spoke thusly,” You will forever approach with an exposed heart, and now you will feel what it is like to live in caution and under the whims of others' actions the way I do. And forever you will know hunger! Not by the measure of your own thundering stomach, but through the will of my leeches, who glutton until they feed on their babes.”

I think I shivered, though, with such insulated skin, it's hard to tell.

I didn't know how horrible it was to involuntarily taste the breeze.

Do not draw the curtain back, please do not look at me! Lest I weep and the witch comes for me again.

And you! You do not weep near me or I too will show you what it is like to live inside out!