- N. Hell

   I get it you damned, bloodied hound.

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Yes, you're sick. We all know. We've all heard. Ring that church bell one more time, won't you? Cry it out to the empty rooms, the empty town, the flooding waters when your ship is in pieces and your legs are too tired to move. Yes, scream it out, in bloody curdling golden words, scream and tell your migraine of a mind what it needed to hear since the moment you took your first shaking, wailing breath.

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  I feel like hell.

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Did that make you feel better? Did pressing your throat through a barrier of quicksand make the vile under your tongue taste any sweeter? I know you can't answer me, I know you've bitten your lip so hard it's started to bleed, but hear me out. Talk to me. Your head, your unnamed machine, the town with a voice but no neighbors. Tell me, please, do you feel any better?

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  Figures.

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No, my golden worry, I do not blame you. I don't blame you for being nauseous or for being dizzy when you drive to your boyfriend's house or for calling in sick and crying to your boss over the phone. No, not at all - not at all.

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But you're dying, darling. Your skin is crawling with angry bumble bees and your head feels like a nice chlorinated pool of dead words on a hot summer day, and yes, you are dying. You can feel it, you can taste it, and that taste, that disgusting aftertaste left in the very back of your throat... yes, that's why you couldn't scream and cry as loud as you wanted, even when your lover offered you a pillow to pour the noise into.

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Bite those words you don't know how to form, and bite hard. When your head feels like you've been clenching your jaw for too long, when you feel your heartbeat pulsing in painful electric waves behind your eyes every time you wake up from a bad dream, yes, you'll be dying, but at least through the pain you'll know that you're still alive.

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Alive. Alive and to be thinking, thinking freely, but too many thoughts at once, too many to write down - you look at the calendar, you check the invisible watch on your shaking wrist and you mumble to yourself, "Yes, it's been too long." It's been too long since you've set sail. The water is stumbling in, flooding your dressing room and sinking to the bottom of your coffee mugs, and you've been ignoring the salt in the air for quite some time. Yet you've still doodled images in those crumpled up napkins - you've still come up with so many ideas since you've last drowned.

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So what was it that made you so tired, so sick? What kept you from writing, from setting sail for adventure, from... anything? Why do you keep all of your thoughts tucked away in yellow sticky notes in the drawer at work, when you could just sit down for an hour and get them onto paper, one by one, until the thought of stress-relief doesn't stress you out anymore?

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Oh, golden worry. You broken-winged dove, you beached whale, you bloodied hound, you damned, damned piece of heaven.

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You feel like hell you feel like hell you feel like hell you feel like absolute hell

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So many thoughts and you can't write them down, so many images that you can't sketch out, so many things you want to scream at the top of your lungs but your throat is fire and it's fire fire fire god why is everything i breathe on fire

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it hurts

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it hurts

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it hurts

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imsorry

Author's Note

Ignore basic grammatical errors, as there are some rules that, as a writer, I don't care to abide by. I feel restricted when following these rules, and since I have such a hard time getting my thoughts across, I'd rather break a few rules than be grammatically "perfect."