I felt the world around me grow small,
the life I fought so hard for constricting itself
around me like skin outgrown.
The urge to shed it haunted me.
I yearned to rake my fingernails through it
until it flaked apart into tiny pieces
that turned to dust forgotten in time.
I felt unclean,
trapped somewhere between belonging
and being a pariah in my own existence.
No amount of scraping away at this skin
left me feeling remotely
like a self I could sit comfortably with.
The tightness of it consumed me,
filled my every breath
until my insides became too heavy with the rot of it.
(How could I tell myself
that this demon was one I had willingly swallowed?
That I was not the unwitting victim
I fooled myself into believing I was?
That I had been terribly wrong,
and that freedom could only be found
in the last dying embers of everything I thought I knew?)
