Heavy Dirty

The chrome is staring at me. The mirrors stare too. The walls have opened up their shadowed eyes and now they’re glinting and gleaming as they follow this body from place to place. I worry and wait and pace and pace and pace as the walls make synchronized moves, as the walls move stealthily, un-pausing as they test the distance left. The walls are the mirrors and the mirrors are the chromes and I am staring from wall to wall and face to face and I am eating away at my hands, at my nails, and the skin is peeling under the pressure, and my teeth are turning red with blood that oozing from my freshly eaten flesh and the blood is congealing under what’s left of my nails and staining the tops of my gums and sticking between my teeth and tinting my tongue a pinker pink. I am in the mirrors and the chromes. I am in the walls but still I am in between them and they have moved so swiftly, so quickly, so quietly that I had yet to realize how close they are to me. I am in the middle of this mirrored hall, this chrome tin, this body box and the walls are higher than my eyes but they’re pressing in on my thighs and my arms and my hands and I’m smearing blood from my fingertips on the walls and the mirrors and the chrome as I worry and wait and push and pray that these walls will go away but they’re only growing tighter and my muscles are tearing as I strain and strain and strain and wish that I was stronger and smarter and bolder and harder and calmer and happy. My muscles give in and I am flattened between the walls and I realize they’re not walls at all and it’s all in my head and I try to breathe a sigh of relief but I have yet to breathe because my lungs are so empty and my throat has closed and my skin is vibrating like a tuning fork when rapped on the bench and my brain is screaming that I need to stop and my hands hit the floor and the floor is a door and I’m falling face first, I’m falling faster, falling into the abyss that tries to swallow me whole but there’s a rope and my fingers grasp and grip but the blood is making me slip and my fingertips tear down to the bone and I cry out and let go and I’m falling still. This darkness catches me and holds me and makes me feel at home but I know that I’m still alone and climbing out of this hole is too daunting so I just lay here and let them swallow me whole.