What does your regret taste like?
i cheerfully tell people i'd rather regret saying yes than regret saying no.
this is a good rule of thumb when you have dug the grave. when you have shoveled entire years of your life into the mouth of mental illness. when you have watched your future dissolve, cotton candy in water, fizzling into mist. is there a way to quantify what exactly it took from me? the true amount (in pounds? ounces?) of what i missed.
so far from the earth, i saw my own body warping in this hideous fashion. how is it that someone can wear all that numb like an anvil and still go about their day? i would have let a tusk rip me hollow and still called myself stable. i wasn't an emergency, i was a fracture. the way ice cracks beneath snow. i deleted myself, turned my spirit into granules.
wayside child. standing by the side of the road, almost killed by the oncoming blow. mouth full of road rash and sand and bacitracin. mouth full of what never made it home. mouth full; body plucked chickenbone empty. like if you close your eyes you start feeling like you're falling.
someone asked me recently - would you rather live with your depression or your anxiety and without hesitating i said oh absolutely my anxiety. i know her, and she absolutely tries to kill me. she tears my hair out, rips all my nails off, makes me panicky and sick.
but depression stood there, her jaw so open, sticking her tongue out for the rain. she watched me, in the gutter, begging her for a hint of my life back. around me, splintered, were the other wonders i had gathered, gathering dust and gravedirt. she turned those yellow eyes at me so soberly and yet i still knew she was laughing. she toed them over into oblivion. mine, she said. mine, before they're yours.
to be sitting there, watching the world spiral so gloriously out ahead of me, the carrot before the donkey. to have it within my reach. to let it slip out of my fingers, almost happily. gently. to touch it without taking. nothing technically stopped me. if i had just gotten up, i could have eaten my fill. i sat at a banquet and starved and still felt like - ah. oh well.
blistering on the tarmac. never been hit, but already roadkill.
