Stains on Terry Cloth

Stains on Terry Cloth

         I started cutting myself again.

         Slow deep gashes.  The arms, legs, one long one across the side of my neck, my cheek, and my forehead.  It's all the same as it was before.  No pain, no joy, no release.  I sit with the same old towel between my legs, stained with my own blood from eons ago.  Sitting there like some ancient tome full of stories from the past.  My past.  Dusty with age and from a time forgotten long ago.  Forgotten by all but me.

         The towel sits hungrily awaiting the blood that will not come.  That hasn't come for years, decades, centuries even.  So long that the memories are even slipping from my own grasp.

         So I cut.

         Wanting the pain.  Wanting to see those tracks of dark liquid.  But they don't come, haven't come, will not come.  Just as the tears will not come.

         I throw the blade in frustration, squeezing the towel that is the only thing that proves I once lived.  That once I'd been alive.  That dingy gray looking glass that laughs back at me with it's blackened maroon mars of my history.  A life where I loved and laughed and lived.

         A life that is now nothing more then stains on terry cloth.  A life I thought I loathed only to find it missed.  Only to find that the pain and hell I longed to escape I now longed to reclaim.  A life lost.

         It is funny how the pain we all wish to escape can become as languished after as a far off lover once you find you that you can no longer feel anything at all.  Anything but the longing.  Anything but the need to return.  Return to the memories that feel as though they are someone else's yet knowing they are your own.  Memories of feelings you no longer remember how they feel only that you felt them and hated them and would do anything to bring back that hate.

         Just to feel.

         Just to be.

         Just to be.