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It was like nothing you'd ever experienced before.
You could smell the sweat as it flowed off of you, as it poured as if to fill an ocean. You couldn't handle the sensation of burning flesh, so you chose to ignore it entirely, as if it was never there at all. It felt like a dream, one that you would surely wake up from, one that simply could not be real, but you knew reality to be fickle. It was as if you were watching somebody bust into your residence, or as if you were watching a slowly encroaching flood.
You were confused. Did you know who you were? Surely not. You resided in a permanent early morning haze, as if you had just woken up, almost as if you had just been born. The warm sensation of the womb of your mother was all-encompassing and suddenly slipped from you, as it fell between your points of manipulation as if sand on a beach. The sensation was all that mattered, but you couldn't seem to grasp onto it — it slipped in and out, it waned like all else. Your focus was the first thing to go.
Being out of focus is rarely useful, except for perhaps as a stylistic choice, and you knew this well. Your vision blurred as if a camera, grasping only the broad strokes, a paintbrush having spread and become useless due to overexertion. It was a repetitious force that did you in, one that struck you with the force of a blue sun, as if you were hit by a nondescript blunt object from your behind. By the time it struck, you didn't know what had hit you.
You knew this wasn't you. You had to know that this wasn't you, that the thing that remained wasn't you, that it couldn't be you. You had to understand that, because it was the last thing you could possibly grab on to. There was a nebulous void at your core, a contradiction waiting to be split, one that no amount of dialectical understanding could possibly hope to fix. Sometimes you wished that someone would crack you open, tinker around, and fix all your bits, as if they could provide electrical signals to stimulate your neuro-chemistry that would suddenly turn you into something that was whole.
Above all else, you desperately wanted that — the wholeness. You needed something again, but it was taken from you, as if you were turned inside out, an unfathomable pain that you could not articulate if you tried. You wanted better than this. You needed better than this.
You thought to yourself. How could you get out of this? What could possibly dull this pain? Surely the sweet comforts of a bullet would help, but nothing is present. The space in front of you was seemingly endless, vast, and above all else, empty. You had become a wild, rabid dog, one that waited to be put out of its misery, that desperately wanted the release of a sharp point to take a swift end to it, that craved a swift slit to its jugular. But that wasn't an option for you.
What else? Could you have just stopped thinking about it? You were always told to just ignore it, to just make it better. But the pain seemed to make that impossible, as it started to spread up you, into you, and around you, a divine punishment for crimes of the flesh and for complicity in the machine. You were being torn apart limb from limb, the pain seeping up you with a tender pit-pat-pit.
In a way, the force tearing you open was almost erotic, the same pain leading to pleasure in a more benign scenario. Though the non-presence of any release was what began to break you. This thought was simply too strange for you to handle, however, so you discarded it. You focused on the sensation. Breathe in, breathe out. You couldn't breathe. You couldn't even seem to think.
That's when you saw it, as the void you were in coagulated into a sludge, a thick ooze, a postmortem hallucination that you wanted to discard. But this was the only reality that you could grab onto as your present and future faded, your past being all that remained. Your thoughts refused to change tense. You had one thought in your mind as the pain began to be padded by the sludge, flowing around every remaining bit of you, coming to dissolve you whole, as you were blissfully unaware of the hideous alternative.
You did this to me. You did this to me. YOU did this to me. YOU DID THIS TO ME. YOU DID THIS TO ME.
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