void

"so.

how are you today?"

    i'm fine.

"you say that everyday, and i know last night you weren't fine."

    i'm sorry, it's automatic, but i am fine.

stop it. (i can't.) "what happened?" (nothing.) "nothing isn't an answer" nothing isn't good enough.

    i've been asked what i've needed for so long even my eyes answer nothing on their own all i have to give you is this emptiness (and i can tell how scared you are to ask questions anymore) i believe i was born with a deep nothing, a void right in the cavity of my chest

"let us help you."

    with hands outreached nurture me with two hundred milligrams a day and people with supposed love in their embrace and desperate pleas of fathomed realities that should be you cannot help me with this need

"we're getting desperate"

    it engulfs me and trails me around unleashed i have poured my soul into this overwhelming desire for wholeness and i just can't--

"fill it"

    i am starting to realize cracks in my femur and rust on my knuckles and dust settling in my ribcage my bone marrow is tainted by what it tries to survive without i line my own bedroom with blank picture frames and half-finished notebooks because how am i expected to fill while i remain incomplete?

"what are we going to do with you?"

    nothing.

"Please don't say that."

    if you stare at a word long enough and repeat it over and over and over again it begins to cease existing, to lose meaning and become a jumble of sounds in a mashed-up symphony that is what nothing is to me that is what i am to me

"who are you anymore?"

    i am not so sure what people actually see when they look at me i want it all to stop as much as anyone i am living in four set walls of rigid fear and it won't stop it is something that whispers in my wrists and lingers fingers in my hair and i am choking on diamond walls put into place by nature itself

    i have been spoon fed "you can't be empty there is something there you are something" for so long it has lost it's own worth i am lost in this sea of carried phrases i am still looking for a way out of the void set in front of me brimming with concrete buildings and paper people that do not show me how to live and seemingly continue without this burden of breathing i possess not the skills to render their pink cheeks effortlessly as my own, to mirror the movements they act out with such ease

    i am tormented by my own war that you cannot see i am fighting off this void and the glass shackles drag me to my knees and i cannot hear your words anymore all i see are mouths moving in strange patterns, languages taunting my mistrust and misunderstanding my hands can almost feel it closing in around me but i am fighting the tangibility

    i have realized things fade just as much as i do

    i refuse to believe these stark walls are my home and the end will be the last words i ever say but maybe it is for i am facing an enemy with a colorless mask where weapons involve spilt-second looks and falsetto rhetorics by dry mouths how can i possibly win against something with no one name can you even possibly win against something so inexplicably large

    i feel it inside of me at the bottom of everything i do i feel it leaking out of my pores and glazing every memory i remember and i see it undoing everything around me in a constant march but if my void is not visible to you please promise to say thank you for trying because

    i am.