Keep digging

What can I do but stare at a blank screen, watch as the cursor blinks, a reflection of the void around me. The emptiness inside of my head and my stomach, it fluctuates but remains the same; a null black hole the size of the cosmos. Illnesses break me down of body and mind, and my youth is gone despite being the youngest. All of my blood, I will eventually bury. It's like father said; without children, you'll die alone. Each passing year mortality knocks on my door, and eventually even it stays away, for the bridges my trauma have burned— the Borderline has charred— leave me as alone as I fear. Perhaps I create my own loneliness without meaning to. This black void swallows any attempt to remedy it. And friends die, family wither, and each moment I regret the time that was lost. What haunts my subconscious has robbed me of so much,but the world spins and my time remains infinite; the derealization carries me away into vast voids of comfort. The kenopsia nurses my blackened heart. But time is not infinite, and when reality comes knocking, the blunt trauma tears my walls down. If only for a moment, I am reminded that time is, indeed, not forever. The losses build and this life has become a curse. Change needs to happen but it's like a steak on a fishing wire; just within reach yet so far away. Illnesses gather within my body and my own cells attack me without reason. Exercising destroyed my back, and healthy eating wreaked havoc on my gut. Everything they tell you to do hasn't worked. I am praised for forcing abled behavior, and when it runs me into the ground, I am not trying hard enough. When depression digs another foot into the dirt, all they see is the shovel in my hands. And I watch as disease and age take those around me, and my illnesses sabotage a cure for loneliness. I am no different from the shadow men that watch me at night; I am watching from another world. I don't have the strength to become angry anymore. When strangers offer love with empty words, only to disappear, I see the game for what it is— its blatant hypocrisy. And I am an attention-seeker, the most toxic of them all, if rumors are to be believed. Crying out for help is but a red flag and the victim sinks into silence once more. For what am I but a downer? Depressed every single day, becoming existential over another's death who I barely knew, even though he changed my life. And what can I do but listen from afar as grandma begins to lose her memories, and it is the very same fear I have when I forget the days, the time, the year. What am I but a blackened heart; one with secrets too dark to stomach. My anger is not acceptable, nor is my suffering. I am not a pretty face and I am easily dismissed like a ghost. I am a child who has nothing important to say. Better seen and not heard, lest I inconvenience another with a single syllable— a mere utterance of discomfort. So as everything crashes and burns, I can't help but pause. Radical acceptance is the key, yet acceptance of this life is read as defeat. Damned if you do damned if you don't, so take me like the others, finish digging this hole and make me into the ghost that I am

©2024 Shane Blackheart