save

iii. so you said,
"let's swallow the world. if it's inside of us, it can't hurt us."
i looked into your mahogany eyes and snorted.
"you really do like the illsuion of control, don't you?"
"well," you snapped back, "at least it won't leave scars."
i flinched.
"okay, i'm sorry i laughed," i replied. "but let me assure you that the scars you can see don't hurt nearly as much as the ones you never will, the ones deeply embedded into the inside of my flesh that can't seem to find their way out."
you shook your head and smiled.
"don't worry," you assured me, "soon you'll never have to hurt again."
"you have no idea what you're doing!" i yelled, but you didn't listen. you never did.

i watched, mesmerized, as you quantified the entire world, dividing it into solids and liquids. hatred, savannas, novels, people, those were all solids; oceans, vodka, blood, happiness, those were all liquids. you worked tirelessly for weeks on end, and whenever anyone asked you what you were doing, you told them that you were giong to save the world, even though what you were really trying to save was yourself. it's easy to get the two confused sometimes.
finally, on the 25th of december, you were sitting at a banquet table literally overflowing with plates of solids, glasses of liquids, and the overwhelming stench of despair.
"you're going to make yourself sick," i warned you, which caused you to giggle as you responded,
"oh, don't worry. i already am."

a few hours later, i found you lying on what was to be your deathbed, moaning and groaning in pain, swollen like a bruise by the weight of the world. you stared at me with your earth-brown eyes and whispered,
"please, promise me something - never swallow anything that you know will hurt you."

ii. so i said,
"let's escape from the world."
it was about a year later, another bomb had been set off, and the sun was still obstinate enough to shine.
"after all," i added, "if it's far from us, it can't hurt us."
someone snorted.
"so you really believe in out of sight, out of mind?"
i glared at her with my life-blue eyes.
"no, but if it's neither inside of us nor outside of us, it can't do a thing to us," i explained, absent-mindedly pinching the skin and bones that i referred to as my arm.
"well, how do you propose to get away?" someone sneered at me, unveiling yellowed teeth.
"you really should stop smoking," i observed. "but to get back to the point, i'm pretty light. birds have hollow bones and i have a hollow stomach and those two must come down to about the same thing, don't you think? i'll bet if i stood up right now and jumped off this roof, i'd be able to fly all the way up into outer space."
someone got that insolent smile off her face and finally started taking me seriously.
"that's impossible," she replied. "even if you did somehow make it, then what? in space there is no gravity, and there is no oxygen, so there is no way for humans to survive."
i rolled my death-blue eyes at her.
"so what? i'm sure i stopped breathing a long time ago already, besides which, i don't really need to live. just think about it: when i die, there will be nothing around me, nothing but nothing in and of itself. the world will never reach me. could there be a more perfect getaway?"
i was grinning but someone was frowning.
"what do you actually want to escape from?" she asked slowly, measuring her words. "the world, or yourself?"

and that was where the doctors found me, sitting on a rofftop talking to thin air, which wasn't nearly as thin as i wanted to be.

i. so the doctors tied me to beds and chairs with their overly confident sturdy gazes and made me answer all their questions. they diagnosed you with impulsivity, delusional disorder, binge eating disorder, and a pretty serious alcohol addiction, and declared that you had died of an overdose. they then diagnosed me with restrictive-type anorexia nervosa, recurrent self-harming and suicidal behavior, severe depression, and paranoid schizophrenia, which is made up, for anyone who may be interested, of hallucinations, a delusion, and an imagined superpower. my hallucination was that i had someone to talk to, my delusion was that there was a way out, and my imagined superpower was that i could fly. and really, they're funny things, diagnoses, because they tell you that something is wrong, which you already knew, but they don't help you make it right, which is all you (or i, at least) ever wanted. and i'm sorry, they made me break my promise, they told me i was severly underweight and forced me to swallow their food and their water and their air and their pills and their truth and yes, yes, i definitely knew each and every morsel of it was going to hurt me.

but i did win, in a way. i was the one who cut your stomach open and let the world out, so i know for a fact that it did, in the end, leave scars.

[zero. it's a shame no one didn't step up and give us the truth. that if we accepted the world, and if we accepted ourselves, scars and flaws in all, we wouldn't hurt so badly anymore. the scars no one can see would heal, and what we chose to swallow wouldn't try to kill us, let alone succeed.
hello, this is no one speaking. no one, someone, and everyone are all indeterminate and interchangeable pronouns. and i am telling you now that for you, for us, for them, for her, for him, and even for me, it is not and will never be too late to make things right; just as long as we stay alive.]