Mirror

Can you show me what fulfilment looks like? Or explain how I might learn to look at my reflection without contempt? How about the ability to recognise myself, or stare in the mirror without crying?
 
Because I wanna know. I wanna know what its like to love myself. I want to know what perfection feels like as I dig my claws beneath my skin and hope the scars will fade. I want to love myself. I need to love myself. Before I let any one else try to love me, I have to love myself. Or at least that is what I’m told. And it leaves me cold and afraid of a loveless life for how am I to be loved if I cannot look at myself?

Its all fucked. And my priorities are way off balance because I wake up every morning with a hole in my chest and a reflection that screams as it grips my jaw and forces me to stare it down. I can’t brush my teeth without the damnation of truth- that I can’t stand to look at myself. I consider covering the glass, so that I might live away from the glare of myself, so I might live a life without this ache that resides in my gut. Then I think I’m not worthy, I don’t deserve the shelter of denial and the chance to postpone reminders of the fact.

I’m obsessed with the dead. Because they cast no shadows and their reflection doesn’t want them. I relate to the rejection and grieve when I’m reminded I’m alive. Because living means looking at oneself, and if I loathe the look I must loathe the living.

Tell me how to be a person. Because I’m doubting my very lungs and I’m not sure how to tell the shrink something inside me has died. I can’t remember seeing myself as a creature other than this, though they tell me I was an angel, I guess they must have clipped my wings.

How do humans heal? When my insides are leaking through the cracks in my skin and I can’t tell my hand from the devils entwined, how do I run from myself? Take me away and abolish my flesh because I’ll never belong here again, and I swear if I got chance to leave, I would never return to myself.