This is for my brother, who made me a stranger to home.
The fan turned on and whirred and clicked and buzzed and turned into a thousand angry hornets all attacking my ears. It went from zero to sixty, a car accident on a road with nobody on it but me, the headlights wiping out against a tree, my body collapsing to the floor, shaking with the force of the engine that drives this nightmare, this living hellscape that my life has become.
I’m sick.
It’s not cancer.
It’s not depression, or anxiety, or OCD, it’s you. At the time, I didn’t know it. Right now, I don’t know anything except bathing and suddenly I’m bathed in darkness. The lights turn off as the water covers me just like it did before only now it’s sinister – my throat was thick with fear, only now it’s thick with the black paint that has covered my vision, it tastes like my tongue and it feels like air but it erupts from my mouth and I fall to my knees and I cry because I am sick of you.
I am sick because of what you do to me every single day.
My spine explodes with pain, white hot nails like the edges of your fist striking my cheek cascade down my back like water, everywhere and nowhere, part of me yet invading my skin in ways I cannot even comprehend. The heat of my own blood is the only tangible, real thing I feel, but even that is a lie in the night that you cast on my life. I am not human, you are not human, we are brothers, and yet you who hurts me, who defeats me, who ruins what I am are the one who turns and sees what you have made, what you have carved with your words like knives and you see me as something unworthy and you cast me out.
