4 AM
It slithers, oily serpent wrapped across my chest, nested in hollow skin. I am needled with holes, it got in through one without fuss, and now it sickens me. Part of it is lodged firmly at the edge of my throat so that my words can never reach my tongue without it first having a say in it. The pressure accumulates in my trachea and all the way down to my stomach so that I am constantly assailed by queasiness, nauseated by the alien weight that parasites my insides. Its fangs force my eyes open whenever sleep beckons, sleep is the enemy, sleep means dreams and dreams means doors open inside that may lead it deeper into my psyche, into my soul. Memories melt into nightmare and I've dreamed these dreams for so long I can never safely tell myself whether they are, in fact, memories or a most vicious fantasy, a disgusting and vile play of an inexplicably ill spirit; a fallacy that betrays its nature in the very fact that the serpent is not, as far as I can tell, an occurence common in all or even most of my kin. Fallout from disgusting memories buried beneath thin veneers of symbolism and the ever-powerful might of denial? Certainly. Never as obvious from the perspective of *I*, though, only you or he-she-they, and then only with a curtain of irony or the cacophony of doubt-seeding shaming and proxy re-enactments of violence unaffected parties spill with no regard whatsoever for the increasing weight of that mass of tar bubbling all the way up to my throat, threatening to ooze from my eyes. In my memory I see my own face distort as my jaw unhinges itself like that of a snake and out from me comes out a skull followed by a sharp, barbed wire spine that rips out everything in its wake leaving a paper-thin human suit that cannot walk or sit or stand upright, only dissipate into muddy waters. In my dreams I see blurry shapes in the bathroom mirror blissfully rendered opaque by the steam, I feel hands that hesitate only so much and slither, climbing and grasping their way across a child's body. I see dark eyes filled with confusion and misplaced anger and sadness targeted against themselves, for what horrible creature they must be to deserve this. For they must deserve this, to survive a world where it were simply an unfair possibility with no rhyme or reason, lest they would drown in these waters. Better then I do not dream. Better then I do not sleep. Eventually I will forget again. Doubt and shame will overtake my mind and odd responses with no rhyme or reason will be my daily routine again, I will not see or feel the serpent's burden on my organs and instead, only the anger and sadness will remain, to be transmuted into a broader kaleidoscope of selves, ideas, emotions.
Doctors will call it healing.
I know the cycle too well and doubt it will ever break before I do. Yet there is still so much I need to do.
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