An Empty Room Of Pain.

I lay on my side, my head is resting atop the crest of my numb right shoulder, my arm would hang in the air but I am holding, in my fingers, the chain that fastens my neck to the door. I wrap the slack around my wrist, and then release. In stochastic patterns I bind and release my wrist over and over again, the futility of the act rivaled only by its mundanity. I watch the room. There is nothing in the room — no furniture, no tchotchkes, not even a window — only a layer of recently disturbed dust all over the floor. Emptiness has a flavour though, it's not the same as sterility. You can sense the essence of sterility in some rooms, even when you cannot see it. A room where no evidence of life or madness can be located any longer, one that to a synesthist would visually taste of rubbing alcohol, one that may even be full of the kind of perfectly generic decor that betrays no emotion nor reality, like a shop floor. A sterile room does not appeal to me, but an empty room has soul. Something was removed from here, I can tell from the patterns of discoloration on the flooring. Someone once cared about making this space beautiful, I can tell from the rectangular indentations beauty left on the walls.

Maybe, a long time ago, this room was to someone's aesthetics what women with mad eyes, curly hair and Callipygian posteriors are to me now. They may have filled it with twinkling lights, hopeful hearts and warm beds, but to be honest, I prefer the dust and the litter of me that is strewn all over the floor. I am watching myself, in this room. In the dirt-marks on the yellow walls, I am watching myself try to clutch at paint and concrete to escape the alarmingly realistic rendition of anal rape from earlier today, I am watching myself give into the suffering and cry; take the moment to wipe my nose with grimy fingers and place them back against the wall, staining it with my costume of sorrow. The placebo of sorrow, is just sorrow. You can wrap me up in a blanket before you make me sad or warm my heart with the belief that I choose this, but on the inside, it all feels the same. I only know one way to feel sad. Sadness seems nebulous when you try to explain it, but its experience is so specific that each time it emerges, and I attempt to distil it into words, I am reminded that language in itself is an *almost* complete form of communication. Like attempting to harness the scent of a person to preserve in a vial, I will always be treading insanity in the attempt to distil my pain, and failing. I may have to die to truly capture it.

I can see it, I can see my pain so clearly, in the clothes that lie all over the floor. My clothes, that he stripped from me as if he were ripping off the limbs of his enemy on a battlefield, sad little scraps of black they lay all over the room, like bloodied flags that once promised mayhem to Damascus. There is such violence to ripping the clothes off a person instead of removing them; undressing a lover is about revelation, stripping one is about exposure, but ripping their clothes to shreds is about destruction. As I follow the path he took to destroying me, I feel his fingers in the bruises on my arms, in the swelling on my lip, in the sharp silence with which he stabbed me as he violated my skin. Sometimes, he seems a bit sterile, it seems as if his soul has been deracinated from what was once his emotional landscape and placed in the body I now know, and eager as I may be to locate where his brain, nay his heart, truly lies, there appear to be no leads. No indentations, no discoloration, no chinks in his armour. Perhaps that is why he is perfect for my hedonistic brand of obsession, there is no hope for answers so I may obsess forever, or I may give up, and finally cease questioning long enough to really feel. I may add drop after drop of water to the barren, rancid soil of his soul, but nothing will ever grow. The seeds of my comprehension do not come from this land, they will not take root. It sounds like I dislike him, I don't, I see him, and I revel in the psychosexuality of reverence that doesn't beget a reason. My curiosity stops at this part of him, this barricade may have been built by him but I have reinforced it on my side, not to keep him in, but to keep myself from attempting to breach this distance. I will give up war sooner than I attempt to invade his capital. I know him as a person, I don't know him as a monster. I know him as a lover, I don't know him as a ruler. I know who my husband is, I don't know who my master is. I don't need to know. I don't want to know. A part of him, to me, is blank. It is without texture. Without scent. Without form. Without colour. Without sound.

It is the part of him that makes me bleed. I can see my blood, on the floor right in front of me, it is aligned perfectly with my line of sight. It's not splashy and red anymore. It is dry, brown and chipping. It is old blood. My blood is old. No longer able to celebrate credulous joy, no longer satisfied with exploring the depths and crevices of turpitude expecting to find something new in the chasm. As it was spilt it was alive, glorious and startling, and now useless but for the visual pleasure of my terrible sense of aesthetics. I know my blood has changed, over the years, but it looks the same. I don't know what I expect to see in the flaky evidence of injury that is splattered all around me. Do I want to see how much my haemoglobin has dropped in the past decade? Do I want to see how it changes colour now that I have more red blood cells than before? I can claim to see it. I can claim to see in my blood the isolating impact of obsessive self-reflection, and how that leaves you, seeking meaning in the silence of speckled scarlet, while the world indulges in saner pleasures that appear less dangerous, like sugar and pixelated entertainment. I can claim to see my entire life, not just the one I am currently living, but the ones I left behind the doors I closed, ones that continue, without me in them to witness how it all ends. I can claim to see the whole world, in the drops of blood around me.

But nothing I see is ever really there.

My eyes barely work.

In reality I lay here, in this dusty room. I cry, because he bound me in here, tethered to all my pain, motionless in darkness, I dance with my sorrow. I only know one way to feel sadness, I cannot explain it, but if you snuck into my myopia, you could see it all around me, in this empty room.