whatisthisplace..?

 

act one.

.

little whiny dark melancholic chick

... the label I painted all over my body a few years ago.

I guess in this life, we all search for an identity we can cling to, especially when you are living your coming-of-age season in life. We try all kinds of things, swallow and vomit, to seek ourselves.

On one stormy day in my life, melancholy was a pill I consumed. No ... it was there woven into each fiber of my muscle since the day I took my first breath, I guess. But expressing it, that took me more than a decade.

It felt good. Gosh, at some point, it felt like a drug you crush and inhale into your lungs, increasing the oxytocin rate all over your veins, and you are high. High on both pleasure and gloom, on thin smiles and tears. The pain throbbing in your chest, it was mesmerizing.

.

act two.

.

And then that became all that I am for the other pairs of eyes.

She's just an addict. A sad, gloomy, even cringy, addict sitting in the corner.

What I saw as a creative pursuit became disgusting mud clinging on every inch of my skin. It was a tattoo I tried to take off in my bathtub.

Scrub

Scrub

Scrub

I tore myself apart;

I sucked her skin, blood smearing both my lips like a sweet bottle of lip tint;

I stabbed her hard in the chest, staring her point-blank in the eyes, emotionless.

Her throat gasping for air, she let off a word I couldn't even make sense.

And she died that night; 

in my arms.

.

act three.

.

Life was okay afterward. I lived like a murderer not guilty as charged. Whispers haunted me here and there, but it was bearable.

Until numbness hit me out of the blue someday some time in nowhere. I felt nothing.

For days I gasped for air and internally screamed for something, for someone, to just help

me

feel.

I tasted the tears running on my cheek while feeling nothing.

Just gloom, silence, emptiness--a void in my soul left open, naught in my corpse left unfilled.

So then I went to her tomb, filling my fingernails with dirt, and start to dig.

Slowly.

Surely.

Until I found her. Laying with her empty eyes, pale cheeks, blue veins.

My finger caresses her chapped lips and we kissed;

tongues meet;

tore off her clothes and started sucking

light diffuses the dark and life diffuses the death

it was an apocalypse.

.

epilogue.

.

And out of that apocalypse, this realm is born.

The holy tabernacle

a solemn shrine

a solitary sanctuary

.

These thoughts and yearnings and hymns I bring to the altar

a synecdoche

of my identity