Oxygen

I just want this torture to end

This torture that’s lasted, haunted and consumed me for years

I need this pain to end

the one I can’t quite describe yet still scores that big 10

the pain that’s worse than the seizures, worse than the memories, worse than the trauma and dysphoria and the pain is somehow all of these injected into one deadly cocktail

A drink so bitter, so deadly and yet irresistible, somehow addictive

A shot glass peppered with relief and then mounting pressure

Pressure like no other

Pressure worse than any panic or asthma attack

A pressure that sits comfortably all over your body, becoming that paralytic

that paralysing weight that makes “reaching out for help” a futile, exhausting act

because at the end of the day when all the meds are taken, all the tears have been shed, all the strength gone from this body

I still can’t breathe under the weight of it all and the pain, that pain so impossible to describe still remains and that, that my dear is the systemic torture I suffer so tell me,

Tell me how to exist like this

Tell me how to make the pressure lighter

To make the cocktail less painful

To resist the voices that overlap to form a beautifully haunting melody

To make those memories not crash over me in waves only for everything else to drown me in between those gaps,

Those desperate gasps for air only met by carbon dioxide not the oxygen my body so craves and requires for survival.