Thick, warm piano notes wrap around my brain. The familiar gravelly voice of a man presses on my wide shoulders as I stare at the flame. It asks me to touch it. Begs me to touch it. I want to reach into it and feel the pain I know I deserve. I want it to melt my flesh away until I am nothing but the skeleton I so long to be. I want to be nothing but bone. Nothing but a blackened corpse, crawling along an expanse of flat barren land. The dry ground crunching between my skeletal fingers, dirt between my ribs and filling my head. Pouring out of the empty cavity. Melting back into the ground only to fill me once again with hopeless dreams and pointless monologue. I don't want to be skeleton, not bone. I want to be nothing. I want to be nothing but wind. Everywhere, unnoticed. Ignored as people swim through me. They go about their own paper thin lives not caring about who or what they rip to shreds in the process.
But instead of wind I am flesh. Hills of it. They ripple over my stomach and thighs and form valleys of pointless compliments. They form valleys of nothing my hatred. The valleys are the beginning of wanting to be ash. Nothing but cinders and toil. Which turns to longing to be wind.
The piano now turns to violin, and the familiar voice I've never heard before changes.
I am no longer bone, or ash, or valleys, or wind, I am me.
I don't want to be me.
