• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
• The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

My body is my own worst enemy.

We were all asked a simple question: Who would be most likely to cause you pain? People said their lovers, their family, their friends because they ached the most when someone they trust betrayed them. They spoke of heartbreak and hearts being ripped out of chests and other things. They said that these pains were a crime against the human body and soul.

I do not care much for their answers because I know every single last one of them is wrong. The truth is staring them right in the face in the way they speak and the words they choose to say but none of them see it like I do. 

My body is my own worst enemy and my organs are the weapons it chooses to inflict damage upon me. 

We are suppose to be the most comfortable in our skin. They say that when danger threatens us, our bodies fight back. At our most violated, we can retreat into the recesses of our minds. Our bodies work with us, they said. But they are blind to how quickly the body can betray us.

When someone says that they do not love me anymore, it is gut-wrenching. I feel the way my stomach turns itself inside out, spilling its acidic contents, like despair and hatred, out. I can feel the poison settling on the rest of my innards, burning a hole through them until it reaches my skin. Its toxic vapors sting my eyes, making me cry, making me more vulnerable. I want to be strong in the face of my loved-but-no-longer-loving lover but my body does not allow me to do so and thus, I suffer and drown in his pleasure as he watches my body betray my every emotion.

When I lose a loved one, I lose my mind as well. Healing happens naturally but my grieving process is only exacerbated by the delusions existing in my head. My ears force me to listen to the sound of their voice again and again. My eyes see them in everything I do, in every face I look and in every person I meet. It is no longer to safe to withdraw into my mind because they are always there, haunting and taunting me with what I can no longer touch. It is all in preparation as my mind raises the guillotine and I lose my head in sorrow. The instrument of damage is my brain and psychological torture is its method.

And every night in the latest of hours that can still be called night, my heart implodes upon itself. The walls collapse into my thoracic cavity and all the blood being carried in and out of the chambers bleed into every fiber of me until I can see only red. My lungs begin to malfunction and no matter how deep a cleansing breath I take in, my exhalation is a hiss, a whisper of the poison within. Suffocating within my own body, I become claustrophobic within myself. I am paralyzed by the physical manifestation of the ghosts of my past that have possessed me, forcing me to relive a staccato repetition of regret and loss.

So it is quite clear to me what the answer to the question is, even if no one else has grasped it yet. My body is volatile and I am constantly at war with myself.  

pavorst:

What I love about studying anatomy is that there are so many hundreds of arteries, veins, nerve endings, articulations and infoldings of tissue within us. We are comprised of hundreds of small things, each of which have to be functional in order for our lungs to ventilate and our heart to keep beating. I’m tracing my veins along my forearm, up to my throat where I can feel the echo of my heartbeat pulse through the arteries in my neck. I wonder what it is inside of me, that keeps it all together. The order and the synchronicity of it all is what astounds me.