It Weights Me, It Drowns Me

It Weights Me, It Drowns Me

  There is someone inside me who has always wanted to see the sun, but I won't let them.
Instead, I stuff them deeper inside me because I'm scared of what they will bring with them when I let them out. All the doubts and hurts and questions I never ask myself. Sure, I'm headstrong and stubborn, and I speak my mind as often as possible, but it's all a facade. A mask I wear so others won't know the real me inside.
  All my most immediate emotions and thoughts go into my hands. I flex and sweep my fingertips over the keyboard with the intent to paint a picture with words. The next day my hand strokes a pencil over a page and I intend to express the imagery inside my mind.
  But never do I speak my soul. Always speaking my heart and never my soul.
  There, swallowed up inside, is my soul. It seethes, it's insidious, it screams, and writhes from where I have it caged. I make it do what I want, I make it shut up. So it sits and twists within the disquiet of my body. To allow that someone free would bring to light all the lies I keep telling myself. The injustices I repeat daily. I know I don't deserve what I'm doing to myself and my sneaky soul whispers that fact to me daily.
  So, inside my mind I scream over its whispers. To no avail. Its whispers are like raging crests of waves against a frigid, stoney cliff side. It infects me. I've tried to cure it but there is no antidote for my soul, save death.
  In my dreams, my soul is most efficacious. It weaves the mistakes of my past into a scene of clarity. Those who I hurt, betrayed, abandoned- all of them haunt me. There my soul dances through fabrications and theatrical fictions of futures I could have had. It reminds me of my cowardice with the ease and grace of a diving hawk. But I am not the hawk, my soul is. Instead, I am the worm wriggling from the dirt to get a peek of the vast expanse of the sky. I am the scurrying rodent.
  I know someday my soul- that coy, ambiguous, omnipotent mass of tangled knowledge- will dig its way out of me. When it does, I imagine, I will split down the middle and all of the simple truths will spill, bubble, shoot, and explode forth and paint the night with the scarlet gore of my denials.
  The bars of that prison have been bending under the pressure. My soul has become listless in light of my falsifications. Its belly presses between the white hot steel of the bars, it has become a gluttonous, sentient presence that plagues my every waking moment. It makes memories I'd rather forget dance across the surface of my wide eyes, burns them into the back of my eyelids- my soul never rests.
  At this moment, my body shakes from the effort, I rock in my chair and try to catch my breath. The axiom of my soul blares in my ears and has become a scourge devouring my strength.
  When at last it becomes too much to bear, too much to shoulder- my own fleeting devices, that is- will I cease to exist and another will take my place? The soul I've neglected and repressed, sneered at with every victorious shove, gloated in the face of.. will it finally get what it desires? Will it ensnare me instead in its vice grip and repay me tenfold for the injustices I've carved into its wispy flesh? I feel it would be my soul's prerogative at that point.
  The day will come. That day rides a thousand crimson eyed, black stallions at my back. I feel the hot exhales scraping down my spine. How long have I been doomed?

Angela Malzow 2013