M.ental O.blivion

It’s 3:23 am. I’m using a crystal glass as a makeshift ashtray and I don’t feel bad about it. Surprisingly. Maybe it’s the meds. It’s difficult to feel things sometimes. Only sometimes. Usually I drown in my private pool of emotions that have been overflowing and flooding my home; not a pair of socks left dry. But I have moments when I’m numb. You know how your lip hurts like hell after you’ve impaled it with your teeth and you can taste the blood in your mouth but then as you spit out the blood and watch it drip down the sink, you realise that your lips has already swollen and you can’t feel much anymore? That’s how I feel. Like a bitten lip. I’m so much pain but then, all of a sudden; nothing.

I spend days and nights trying to appease my mind and my soul but the battle is continuous. My mind thinks that numbness is better for me but my soul wants the pain; the satisfaction of seeing that blood dripping and knowing that a single drop of my essence shows that I am, still, alive.

Sometimes I think that’s the only time I truly feel alive. I wake up so disappointed every time I discover a new burn or cut or scrape on my body. To discover it means I didn’t remember having it inflicted in the first place; another moment lost in my mental oblivion.

Maybe that’s why I yearn for human touch so much. I think that somewhere deep inside, I believe that people can hurt me more than table corners and door handles ever could; no matter how strongly I ram into them. Maybe I’m waiting for a person whose touch leaves a hand-shaped burn on my thigh, or whose knee, pressed against my own, bruises my bone. Maybe when they kiss me, my lips will become frost bitten and my eyes will desiccate as they inhale my soul. Maybe I want that suffering. Perhaps I want it to replace the giant hollow in my chest that no amount of caressing and kindness can fill.

I sit here, on this cracked, leather couch, barefoot and dizzy. Cigarette in hand and hair in a bun. Listening to my sad music as I blindly glance over the titles of hundreds of books placed on the shelves in front of me. I want to sleep but it is now 3:38 am and what I truly want is to feel. Pain or pleasure. To feel.