Toenails

Another old piece of prose from camp. This one's kinda gross, really. 

*triggers for gross mentions of feet, and other stuff*

I am a piece of toenail. If I swallowed myself, I would feel myself scratch against my esophagus, and my tongue would scream the taste of toe. I am a piece of sharp shell that once was alive and a part of me. When the sun comes out, toenails dance and separate themselves, leaving behind deserted homes: the empty, bloody sockets. But toenails are dead, perpetually death. They are a piece of life that failed and grew into a protective death-shell. Nothing tastes good on fifteen-year-old toenails; not mayonnaise, not guacamole, not whipped cream.

I am broken and ragged and sharp, a fragment of my shattered toe. I will visit reality, piece by piece. Life will mean more than broken nails. The world must accept this and refuse to put up with toe stubbing. Nails can hold the world together. Caked blood seals the crack between the fifteen-year-old toenail and the world.

Bandaid solutions...

I wrote this in 2005, and just found it now. Kinda sad, now. And less real now.

I can feel it here. On my arms and shoulders, not in my head where the memories hurt, or the rest of my body, or anywhere else. Just here.

It’s easier like this – bandaids, blood, long sleeves. You can’t put a bandaid on your memories to make them go away; they haven’t invented that kind of brain surgery yet. You can’t bandage up my mouth to make the bad taste leave it. But you can clean up your arms, take care of yourself. Weird, just attacking myself more, but it’s the only real way to live my life; let it leak out with my blood, then smother it in a bandaid until it isn’t even real anymore; it’s not emotion, it’s matter. It’s blood. And it’s leaking out of me this way. I can talk like this for hours, because it isn’t really me. It’s a haunted voice in a bleeding broken body without a future. The real me went down the toilet with the bloody towel that I didn’t want anybody to see. The real me isn’t here anymore, this voice isn’t mine. The real me went somewhere, one day, into another world where it can enjoy things, and it left this flat and fractured soul in this bleeding, broken body on the earth to suffer but refuse to feel. Maybe the real me will come back to that body once the scars have faded away and the stars come out to replace them.

I think this is going to be part of a play, or something. I wrote it at camp. What do (hypothetically plural) you think?

"I want to stop seeing this, more and more and more. People who look fine on the outside, but then something slips and you can see everything that’s wrong clearly carved into them. Carved into me, too. I wonder if I always looked as bubbly as they do. A bleeding bubble. Fine now, but with reminders to hide and sleeves to wear just in case what I see is the same as what they see, just in case it somehow is visible to them, even though everybody says it isn’t.

I try not to keep secrets, but as I drink up more and more of what I see around me, the long-sleeved shirts in the closet become less and less a symbol and more and more a reality.

I want to forget that these beings surrounding by skin are people, and that they feel things too. Maybe then I could forget that this is their reality, forget that what I saw when they move is really there, and not something figmented by my own sick imagination. I want to pretend that maybe, just maybe, none of this is true.

I want filtered vision, so I could see what’s there, but not the meaning lurking behind it. I want my ignorance back. I want to numb my “hey, that used to be me” nerve."

Nothing Happened

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I remember when nothing happened. When everybody just sat, and remembered, and recalled bluntly that nothing had happened, nothing ever had happened, nothing would ever happen. It’s like that online torrent of answer that translate to “nothing much, you?”, when really, everything is happening and nobody even knows it. And it’s so automatic that nobody stops to realize that it isn’t true. They don’t even bother to write it in real words; it’s always just the same “nm, u?” and the conversation ends.

But what is nothing much? Really it’s everything. In my world, nothing is everything and everything is nothing. And red means green and green means red so you can cross all the roads as you reach them; don’t wait. Every time, I’m forced to reply “nothing much,” it’s like there’s something missing. Because even though I say that nothing is everything, it’s an all-to-common and hardly true reality that nothing is nothing, and that’s how it is. And so, nothing will happen ever again, as people rush through their jam-packed lives and never stop to realize that everything is happening, and they don’t bother to know it.