What it Feels Like

It always reminds me of one of those horror movies at first, where the monster gets under the victim's skin and plays around for a bit. Like the scarabs in The Mummy, or the alien that bursts from the handsome guy's chest in Aliens, or, even, the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs who makes a suit for himself out of dead women's skin. I feel like someone or something is trying me on for a bit, stretching me out to the point of bursting, messing around with my bones and arteries and everything else in there, affecting my every nerve.

The beast climbs up and down, mostly hanging out toward my center, massaging my shoulders too roughly, slithering down my spine with tiny bites that cut like class shards and bleed. It stretches upward and downward, and my center feels like a single wearied muscle.

Maybe wings will sprout. The creature is something come to make me new. The contracting of my muscles, the aching of my bones is to bring forth a new part, and all of this will pass.

But the wings are too heavy, too big, and I can't bear them. They weigh me down, so that I lean back against my will. They'll grow, I think, so much that they'll touch the ground, and will drag to relieve me. But they stop growing a few centimeters short, and I continue leaning for a very long time, wishing they'd just rip from my body already. One brief moment of agony, and then the gradual lessening.

Or maybe the wings pull but will not separate, and I feel myself pulled over and down, and I keep going down through the earth. I continue downward, six feet, and think I'll stop. My wings and I sleeping enveloped in worms and ants and little sproutlings forever, together but painless in our rest. Yet, still it drags me onward.

I leave the earth's crust as I continue to descend, hitting the mantle, which is like a wall, and I'm sure I can't break through. But we manage it, somehow, and still I am attached. We pass through fossils of creatures no one knows ever existed and I wish my mind were more prepared to take in the sights. But this isn't a tour, it's a descent.

I continue down with my wings, my burden, through the outer core, and am engulfed in flames. The weight and the flames are all I feel now, my senses otherwise dismantled. Everything now is felt, if it exists for me at all. And still, we continue, and I don't burn up. Vaguely, I wonder why, but then thoughts too are lost.

We hit the inner core, the center of the earth, and it is nothing like Verne thought. It is hell. I have arrived. And in hell, you descend interminably. And there is no end. And your thoughts return, regretful and angry. Those thoughts and your feelings are all you have, and it always increases. Ever worsens.

I stretch and crack and massage, but it only continues, this sensation. I try to force my thoughts elsewhere. I try to count to a million. It seems a large number, but I'm there so quickly, and am not distracted at all. It seems more like a measure of the increasing hurt. And I give up.

I give up, and I swallow a Vicodin. And everything's floaty and happy, and those wings are chopped off while I'm too numbed to care, and I float upward, back through the layers, to the sunny day, regardless of the weather or whether it be night. I lose sight of what's real. I just don't give a damn, and it's a positive experience. I don't know any better. And I am made a pleasant woman. I smile, I laugh, and I float along. And I don't remember a thing.

My back hurts today.