An empty cavity

I yearned for tears, salty and undeniably sad; I yearned for rage, fire-hot and dangerous; I yearned for happiness, warmth and a beating heart; but I was dehumanized and I stumbled into this state of limbo between slumber and awakening.

I felt like an inadequate replica of a human being that someone had fashioned out of plastic, a reflection of what a soul should be but devoid of pleasure and pain. Living was a swathe of dull pastels, like a photograph taken out of focus.

It's a strange feeling, knowing you're clinically alive, but feeling more dead than a decomposing cadaver. I could still see my emotions, silhouetted against the shadows of my former self, but each and every time I reached out for them they shrink away deeper into the darkness.

When you fight so hard to detach yourself from such a great agony as the pain of death you stand to lose... the feeling of feeling. I used to idly graph the incline of the aches of my heart and crack the spine of my dreams, kept alive only by carcinogens and culinary binges. I grew impassive as I carefully avoided sadness and jacked up my serotonin levels, religiously packing negativity in bubble wrap and into a storage room bitter with distance.

Gone were the crying matches from trips down to memory lane, the road which I single handedly destroyed. I reclaimed what I thought was happiness from death, tasting the temporal warmth of this cheap copy. Gone were the nerves that fishtailed down my spinal cord and threatened to snap my sanity into two. Gone was the gravity of depression, but passiveness swept up the shores of my heart in an orbit that destroyed any ability to feel.

I sought carnal unions in a secret prayer that heated nights and tangled limbs would teach my heart again to crinkle in the sweet warmth of love but I stumbled only on passionless intimacy, leaving me emptier than when I had begun. I watched the mosaic of my emotions fall apart like rain, then crushed below my feet like a chicken bone. I was rewired like I was a machine, to be neutral and unfeeling.

I tried to recreate what I was before, a living thing, but I could only fashion a caricature of the memory. I want my nerves to smoke and overheat, my legs to tremble wobbling like jelly, I want to be an eroding mess again with anxiety that pulsed through my blood, with pockets of sadness in between my joints, but now everything just tastes like ash.

I want to feel. Even if the hurt will blister through my skin and will drown me in its crashing waves I will take it. Just to be, to feel h u m a n