a cry for help

I start stories and abandon them, words aplenty but each not the story I wish to indulge. I'm cold, though the heating is on like it always is, cold even as my skin dries out. This, I imagine, is what it must feel like to be a loaf of bread in a freezer, forgotten.

Being a woman-shaped loaf of bread sucks somewhat: everyone is looking to gouge out a slice of ya. Everyone including me, as I slice myself to keep detailed records of all that men have said to me. Lest I forget, and, god forbid, commit the cardinal sin that is double-dipping.

Yet the heart craves the familiar. It craves a known chaos, a safe pain, in face of the mounting uncertainty that each day piles upon. It craves a solid, identifiable, fixable reason to feel awful. I can leave people who hurt me but I can't leave the world.

Or so I tell myself, each time I leave the house and every road morphs into an opportunity, every car a pomegranate seed. Kill yourself, whispers a voice eerily like my own. I can't, I reason. I can't because there's no certainty that we'll die. The voice understands. The voice sees another car, bigger, faster.

Kill yourself, it whispers.

So I confine myself to my room, no cars in sight. I tell him I'm struggling with suicidal ideation, using clinical words to distance myself from it. He tells me he wishes he could help. It's not good enough.

He makes himself some toast.