Touch

Expert from a longer writing on my relation to the five senses.

Visions of crisp shocks and a hard rattling in my bones have often lingered in heaps of smoke around my nerves, pulling me deeper into their embrace, and dulling my sight, leaving me vulnerable to the chuckling of feverish flames, the friendliness of a blade, and the grasp of water. I yearn for the intimacy provided by the smouldering pinch of skin, a scab to pick, a bruise to hug, a bone to hold as a wasp swirls around, and inches into your skull pounding and pounding as your nails lift and warp into disembodied voices chirping at you to feel, to feel the paint chipping off your teeth falling out of you clattering brokenly on the floor, as something cold wraps around you and dulls your existence to a warm dull, doe like state. It is a true miracle that I’ve made it this far without turning my flesh into a sewing project of my own design, that I haven’t stapled together my fingers, or done what Hanya Yanagihara’s JB couldn’t and wrapped my own hair into a beast prepared to suffocate me in fuzzy delusion, bringing me back to the pleasures of decomposition.

For all I force myself to prod and poke at my own being, there is little true sense of feeling behind any of the strokes of paint on my skin. Each pressure point in my body is numbed by bored expression. I may feel the graze of flesh against my inwardly rotting body but I do not feel it. I do not know what it is to feel and touch in the same sentence, as much as I do know what it is to live this exact feeling. Perhaps that is why I cannot feel. I know too much of what is to feel and be affected that I will no longer allow others the satisfaction of feeling, my feeling.

Every bit of my body is marred with numerous blunders, from the scars lining my hands and thighs, to the bruises growing like roses on my knees and back. I am a broken porcelain doll, holes in my earthenware, rips in my victorian frills, chunks stolen from my hair. I am nauseating. Unacceptable to polite society. Deranged and Enraged. A lump of broken bones and vulgarity. A ruined painting with years of paint split on top. This destruction of self is addicting. What’s one more bruise, when you're already adorned with an abundance of unremovable truths? Some of them are your own transgressions but most of them stem from others' misdeeds. Their misdoings become my burden to bear, to hold onto to and pour salt into the wound, making sure they never properly heal, so that I’ll always be aware of the disfigurations across my body. I’ll feel them more when the temperature drops no matter how much I wrap cloth around my body, ants scattering around my body from scar to scar, finding old burns and betrayed skin. In the summer months I’ll reach behind my knees to feel the warmth of stretched skin resting there. I’ll try to remember running through sprinklers and feeling the mud between my toes, the sun on my shoulders, he’s always there watching over me. There's warm honey around me, a tremor in your hands, a bee on my shoulder. “Tag?” When did I forget how to bloom? I suppose I’ll stay trapped in my bud, until the summer season rests her hand upon my shoulder once more.

I think I spent so much of my life being called a bad person that I’ve begun to transform myself into the rotten human they wish me to be. Hatred speared its angry seed into childlike wonder and has sought to corrupt me since, it has succeeded. Born or made evil, is a question that I often consider. Am I a product of circumstance or a consequence of the world's balancing slates? Is the simplest of reasons the truth? The earth desired hatred and therefore I exist? Was I not harvested for this role of cruelty, it was just given to me? I was destined to be hated and shoved into the mud, to feel citrus tears running and laughing like the River Styx.

I swear I can feel dirt underneath my fingertips from digging my own grave, but I cannot stop. There is something awaiting me in hardened soil, moist underground ready to kiss along my scars. My body was not gilded like Helios or wise like the heart of Athens city. No. It was a snarling rotting thing that bit back when you bled on it. It would wane and try to hold onto me as we both fell off a deserted rooftop, clutching onto each other's nightgowns as our Mother screamed, incoherently from inside. Nothing of love or comfort has ever come out of this body. In turn I am not loved, not sheltered or comforted, not treated like a child. I want to be loved. I think I might have been loved once but I cannot remember. I want to know how it caressed my palms, grazed its scent against my cheek, I want to remember how it tasted, spinning into my teeth like a dentist to drill, how did it shine? Was it mindless and nonsensical or full of sense and structure? What did it look like? Was it violent, with the rage of a marred dog or gentle as peaches' hair, returning to you with the same might of an old tattered book?

“Am I suffering beautifully? Is my agony lovable?” – Anonymous