You wonder sometimes if you’re just a dramatic brat so starved of any sort of personality that maybe this is just something you drummed up to be interesting. You’re not sure whether that thought comforts you or makes it worse, because if it is simply something you cooked up, then you could end it just as easily. There was never any definitive reason that made things turn this way, so maybe it could be something you came up with while bored. You’re sure of that some days. On the bad ones, you’re not.
You felt what you felt and even if there had been no basis to it, no causative event, it was still real. Tangible. Something bitter you could always taste at the back of your throat and feel weighing down behind your eyes and on your wrists. Something heavy and oppressive and uncomfortably silky that fashioned the jagged lump that was permanently lodged in your throat.
For a brief while, you thought it had gone away for good.
It hasn’t.
There are good days, that turn into weeks, and then months. Months where you genuinely believe it’s gone. But then you’re reminded of all the ways it’ll never go away.
You do things to try and cheer yourself up.
But that slimy, sour mass of a mini black hole that seems to have set up home at the base of your stomach sits stubborn and powerful as ever. Scoffing at your pathetic, weak, whimpering attempts at retaliation. You debate giving up.
Not in an everything sense, but little things. Little things that are never noticed by anybody else but weigh warm and heavy and suffocating against your skin. Little things you gently set on the ground and then on fire.
You think it’s hilariously stupid how those little things ever even mattered to you.
Lie on your bed and breathe. And stare at the ceiling and sleep. And when the sun’s out, get out of bed long enough for a few quips and obnoxious laughs and once the house is essentially empty because everybody is at work or school, climb right back in and lie on your bed. And breathe. And stare at the ceiling. But don’t sleep, because sleep is a break your body seems unwilling to take.
The sun is setting and then you are asleep. Soft sheets and soft pillows and soft sighs.
Wake up a little later on in the night to a quiet house. To muted light coming through the window and through the crack under the door. Sleep is a break your body is unwilling to take.
Lie on your bed and breathe. And think of all the times you laughed so hard it hurt. A stabbing pain at the base of your jaw, the side of your ribs, gripping your stomach–uncomfortable and painful. It’s unfair that you laugh and your insides twist and break and give way as if they weren’t built to accommodate a joy this vast, a happiness this loud. Yet your body is perfectly content harbouring a black hole, nourishing a discontent that should have been too much for it to take. A star is dying inside of you. Made of matter compressed and pushed into a tiny space. Everything that wasn’t right that you inhaled anyway, nestled amidst organs and arteries beating red and steady–enveloping it in a warmth that is yours to be loved with but is swallowed by that swirling fog at the base of your stomach.
Your body is a traitor, and your mind even more so. And you don’t know what to do. How to teach it to be more welcoming of delight and less so of misery.
So lie but don’t sleep. Or think a little too deep, lest your heart goes the way of your dreams–hacked and torn out of existence in the absence of sleep.
Yours Truly,
Crumbling Moons 
