Unwoven

Does someone carve out time for me like I do for them?

Sometimes, I wonder, if I just stopped - stopped texting, stopped posting, stopped breathing - would anyone notice? Without the smell of decaying flesh or the sound of life expelling from my swollen rib cage, would anyone sense that I've been lying face-first on the cold marble floor for days?

But I'm trying not to think that way. I don't like dark thoughts, so it's hard to understand why I write about them so frequently. They cloud my vision like a cheap pair of sunglasses or my contacts when I forget to wipe my overpriced but highly effective French lotion from my hands before application.

I try to block out the bad thoughts. I use cotton to stuff the crevices where the dark seeps through. But when you put up a wall for protection, it also becomes a cage.

When you lock something on the outside, the inside things stay trapped. And it festers like a rotting wound, growing more sour, more rancid by the day. Until it takes over completely. And soon, something that was small, like a hang nail or a piece of yarn that's come undone from a sweater, becomes a large, bleeding pile of chaos.

But I don't want to think like that. No, not when I've healed myself.

Haven't you heard my success story? The one where years and years of negative feelings and self-depreciation and starvation and wounds and hair falling out and clogging the shower drain and body checks and pinching skin and picking at nails until there was nothing left but dried blood caking the tips of my fingers all disappeared because I learned to love myself?

I hadn't either.