Nightmare or Reality

by Shalom Hogden-Akers
(Gosford)

One day it'll get better, i tell myself
One day, these unfathomable weights will be cut from my body
The thick brewing swirl of mental incapacitations will cut me a break soon enough..

Sometimes the world seems so obsolete.
I awake from a vortex of erratic nightmares with no lungs to breath and i wish it was just a singular occasion.

The longer i see myself away from a substance to numb my mind, the more im thrown into a void of chaotic nothingness, in which i feel everything and nothing at the same time.

Most would give it a title such as 'depression' or 'anxiety' but i would call it an embodiment of my own soul that I created through years of continued abuse, ingnoring all the warning signs, and crying for help when i find myself unable to breath anymore..

Sometimes i need to grab folds of my skin until it burns, just so i know i can feel pain, just so i know that this is real, because sometimes, this all seems like a manifestation conjured by my unpredictable thoughts.

I think about dancing steel around the shell of my soul, just to see if there really is a core operating anymore.

Sometimes i think of clawing out my corneas for no given reason, as if my decrepit mind is on its last legs and fails to see any hope of thinking straight anymore.

I crumble in the sheets of my own bed, my eyes glued to any distraction that can reduce this feeling of helplessness.

I feel so endlessly distant from any other form of life I contact with.

The lazier i grow, the more i hate myself for letting myself fall deeper into this void of chaotic energy that continue to saps all the positive until im left an empty vessel, a nothing, a nobody.

Every task or goal I set in place is simultaneously counter-acted by none other than myself, as if im in an endless loop of fixing and breaking and fixing and breaking.

I've put the pieces back so many different ways, i wouldn't call myself a puzzle anymore, because a puzzle has a solution.

Im lost and I can't find my way back..