Compilation of short bits

I'm Fine Short

The pain is never constant; it goes and comes like the ebb and flow of the tide. But when the pain hits you all at once - all those moments of loneliness, of shame, the memories you try so hard to forget, the images and sensations that haunt your thoughts in your darkest moments - it's unending all the same. It's a python around your windpipe constricting till your lungs are screaming for a moment of peace. It's a knife in your gut twisting with the invisible hand of the demons you can't quite run from. It's internal bleeding and a clotting problem, and the blue-black bruises darken your thoughts instead of your skin. It's a broken leg that doesn't stop you from walking but does stop you from moving forward. Your heart bleeds, and the torrents stain your cheeks and all you see is red while the tears dry and flake in the ridges of your hands. No matter how many times you wash them, they'll never be clean because the damage is under the skin in a place no one else can see it. You scream yourself hoarse from the inside, but all that comes out is a shaky smile and a shakier reassurance. All that comes out is a lie that you learn to get better and better at repeating, but the only person you're really trying to convince is yourself. The screaming never stops though, till your ears are ringing with it and you become deaf to anything else but the sound of your own agony. Sometimes it might quiet enough for you to hear the conversation that's happening outside your head, sometimes the python takes mercy and the demons get distracted and you think you can see that the sky is blue (not red) or that the grass is green (not red) or that your tears are dry (not red). But the vice around your heart never fails to remind you of how much you can still bleed, and your own self-loathing tells you to paint your skin red because at least then you'll feel the same on the outside as you do on the inside. So you bleed, bleed, bleed, for a thousand eternities, and it stops hurting only when you accept that it'll never stop. And so no, the pain is never constant; but that's only because you know that it is. You smile with blood in your mouth, breathe with death in your lungs, and walk with agony in your heart. And you scream, through all the sticky redness coating the inside of your throat, but the only sound that ever makes it through is, "I'm fine."