When You Can’t Feel Your Body
Everything becomes blissfully numb
It’s there, the limbs and how my legs turn like spinning turbines. My right knee creaks under the turn of my weight. I float in a space I haven’t been in for a long time. Since I was with them, where my body was always on this earth but my mind was escaping.
My mind escaped to the ether with the abuse. Mainly verbal, emotional, occasionally physical. The fear catches in my throat. I’m choking on it. That visceral choking where you’re unsure if you can get out of it by yourself. My skin feels like I could stratch it off and leave it behind.
How can I be scared of someone I can easily overpower? How can I feel like a child when I’m clearly not?
My nerves fire on edge. I’m here but I’m only a hull of a human being. That piece left behind no one wants to consume. I try to hide from others, work, life, I make sure to isolate myself. My thoughts trickle out like the sound of a faulty faucet. I try to drown them out with music.
Any sense of pain reminds me that I’m still living, breathing, alive. There’s a cut on my left finger from slicing it with an aluminum lid. I remember the cursing at being so clumsy with it. It burns sometimes depending on what I’m absentmindedly doing. My body which never complains aches daily. It’s reminiscent of being trapped in a flu-like state.
My home won’t be my own. My family is moving to where I live. The comfort of my long escape will be short lived. I keep wondering if they really will move to my brother’s outskirts. Or will they select me? At the last second will they end up at my old apartment? Only they don’t know that I’m not living there since I predicted this would happen.
I’ve tried explaining their behavior. I’ve made attempts at loving them no matter what. I’ve tried taking my mother’s words of ‘you’re useless, worthless, fat, unwanted, an idiot, etc’ and try to repel it from entering my ears.
I’m trapped within the past and present. I become numb in preparation. My mind retreats to that dark corner where it can defend itself. How do you protect yourself from the people who are supposed to protect you? Those people who are supposed to be your safe place and home? I’ve been able to create such a vibrant, beautifully colored life here. I try to not let the colors drain out, yet, they drip down each day.
What do you do when your home you were raised in is meant to collapse and crush you under it’s faulty structure? That’s my childhood, dragging my body from underneath this fucked up structure. I remind myself I’m in control. I can handle this, yet that voice echoes within the deepest reaches of my mind.
This is the one thing to unravel you like a ball of yarn. To obliterate your world like gasoline and fire. The numbness spreads to the tips of my fingers. I try to remind myself that I can still feel, it’s just a matter of tuning into it now.
