• lifeless • poems and oneshots •

•ink•

The Pigment Infection is a disease caused by extreme amounts of anxiety and stress. When a person is affected, they may experience many episodes of panic attacks and they cough up the ink that's been clogged through the heart. The Pigment Infection can lead up to other fatal symptoms such as ink poisoning, heart attack, and stroke. There is treatment to the infection, however, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (depending on how bad the ink clots are and how it flows through the system). So, they either spend out-of-pocket money on a costly surgery or they let the ink flow through their system for months, years, decades, until the infected dies.

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It's odd thinking about how once, I was "normal". It seems like just last week I was sipping champagne on a private beach house in Miami, trying to impregnate what the waves of the ocean sounded like along the sea bank, what colors the sky were painted each sunrise and sunset, etcetera, etcetera. Or maybe it was yesterday? I no longer know. All concepts of time are null to me when the doctors have been stuffing my body with tubes and piercing my skin with needles, drawing blood, and then ink; blood, then ink. When they're not filling my insides with odd machinery, that's when things tend to get interesting, because they start asking questions. They grip onto their clipboards tightly, straighten their coats down to the last crisp, and start firing away. The questions are all meaningless, the same repetitive "How are you feeling?" or "Is everything alright?" ringing in my ears. Even though my response is the same "I'm fine" every time they ask, all the doctors give me a certain look- an expression of commiseration, as if they've been through the exact same experience I've gone through. It's all the same look.

Call it a well-known proclivity for me to jump to conclusions, but I'm pretty sure that any sort of sympathy I'm going to receive from these doctors is complete and utter slander.

It's all in the way they act. Their behavior is too cheery, too fermented. It's as if they believe that acting all lively and happy is going to expedite my recovering process-almost as if they want to get rid of me. What they don't realize is that their inadvertent behavior towards my recovery is making things worse.

Because they don't know what it feels like, and that's mockery to me.

They've never experienced the gnawing at your stomach that makes the world sway at your feet; they don't know what it's like to layer your skin with as much cosmetics as you can to cover up the dried ink that's stained on your chin, your hands, your neck, whatever you can hide; they don't know what it's like to stop breathing, and suddenly have the full-on effects of a panic attack slam on you like a freight train; to feel your knees give in as you clutch your stomach, in hopes that the burning black ink retching from your throat will soon stop, that your breath will be returned, that the anxieties flickering through your body like fireflies will quickly die.

Heck, where did all this anxiety and stress come from? How did it all start? I don't even know myself, it's been a complete mystery for years. Maybe it was when the bed started feeling emptier, even though I could clearly see the silhouette of my former husband, his chest moving up and down in a steady formation. Perhaps it began when I became the corporate heir to the chairman position, and all the endless work hours and sleepless nights began to take a toll on my sanity. It could've started when the divorce papers filed in as I watched my now ex-husband take my son's hand and walk all the way down the driveway, towards the car, and far enough from me that I haven't seen him since. Either way, this... "condition", as they so call it, couldn't have come out of nowhere. It's like I'm going crazy.

So how did I go from being called "daughter", to "wife", to "mother", to "crazy"?

Where did things go wrong?