Ever since I was born, I was rotten. I was born out of contempt, made out of hate. It was always going to be this way, and that is fine. I can accept it, even embrace it, I’ll find some way to aestheticize the gasoline in my blood. I feed the poison until it’s all-consuming and surrounds me in a warm blanket of filth and flesh.

I don’t want to lose it, because I don’t know what else there is. There isn’t much else for me.

I lack creativity and natural talent. A more accurate description is that I lack the words to describe the vivid feeling in my chest. The way my head throbs every day, trying to break out of its bony constraints and slither out of me because I swear there’s something meaningful in there.

So I can find comfort in the rot, in knowing that it must be worth something. It has to be, because I cannot accept that I just feel everything far too deeply and intensely until there’s nothing to feel at all.

I cannot even accept mundane kindness. I react to it like a vulture, pecking at it until I’ve taken all there is, harbouring and hunting the remnants because I just cannot trust it. I react with suspicion and - because I refuse to show that I’m afraid - my fear turns into anger.

I cannot believe that someone would choose to love me without wanting to destroy me in the process. I was born rotten, born to be destroyed, broken. Picked apart and ridiculed, but still held by those same hands who yearn to destroy me. Watching the eyes that belong to those hands as they study me. My reaction to the venom and blows, all while I relish in that pure and intense attention to detail they’re giving me. I’d bathe in it, so much so that it would become clear even to the cruel hypothetical beast that I am the debauched one, not them.

They’d know this as well as they’d know anything, once he sees that their cruelty to me felt more like care. Like they care so, so deeply, wanting to see me. They must, to know exactly where to poke me for it to hurt, and how well they must know me to do it. to study each expression in my eyes as he draws more blood, and learn where it hurts the most.

Everything catches my attention, nothing satiates me completely. I am starving.

I go to work, I go to school, I come home. I function well in society; in fact, I contribute more to helpful normalcy than many around me. It is so fucking pathetic, existing in two places at once, with only the one I despise - the healthy one - being real. There’s no place for the raging disgust and putrescence in my head here.