My spine cuts through my skin like jagged glass; bending over, I run my hands down this torn body of mine, silently counting the number of slices in my vertebrae my weariness will cause me. And despite all that I have said in the past (things that you’ve never believed), I will admit that this disease is but another fetish: to feel my skeleton beneath thin, flawless skin, to create a map of my own body—eyes sewn shut—using just my fingertips to guide me through a maze of bone. This skin is but a sheath of translucence, skin which personifies beauty  in one everclear, immaculate package spun in restriction and sorrow.

I pocket my fingertips beneath the curved bone of my ribcage, pressing into my body with alien fingers that stretch towards infinity, and I wonder if I still possess the strength to tear back this cage and release my heart. To open my torso on an autopsy table, my back arched, neck exposed, eyes dilated in a post-coital manner. My heart pulsing beneath the hot, white lights of the medical room—emotionless, clinical—as if showcased in some high fashion editorial. Articles blown wide open with pages upon pages of mutilated girls with gutted stomachs, glowing with some orgasmic sheen and their bones dripping with acid. Then me on the operating table, flatline, like Jesus on the cross, my limbs stretched open. Like society, you will rip my heart from this vulnerable, open body----this seemingly perfect body—my tendrils hanging uselessly down my thigh, but the beating will continue, on and on and on, like it always has (it always will).

In the heat of the moment, I let go, my skin red as blood flows back into my ribs. My cage shall not be unlocked tonight, nor shall it ever—for isn’t that the purpose of a ribcage? To hold the heart within, a sacred gem, behind these strong yet brittle bars of bone, staring through walls of flesh and muscle. A shield to protect the heart from damage. So where did I go wrong? How did you obtain the key to unlock my cage?

Isn’t it appropriate for me to hang from the ceiling like an archangel, like Michael shining through my dilated pores, in the position of Freedom and with my cage opened, my heart finally free? Or are my wings not strong enough to support this body, frayed and tattered and stained with charcoal, to support this pale and beautiful corpse? My corpse was all that was beautiful to you, it seemed, as I hang here with my spine cutting through my skin and blood coiling down my thighs. I am beautiful in your eyes, only when my pesudodeath is magnified behind a lens of mock perfection. I am nothing to you.

You turned me into a painting hung from your high heavens, a macabre churning of fantasy and death, as if Salvador Dali himself were to commit artistic suicide and stretched his skin onto a canvas. Death, after all, is an art form, romantic in all it’s medieval glory. Poetry spinning madly into the nine layers of Hell. With a paintbrush in hand, you’d dip your brush into my blood and bring Dante’s nightmare to life, my howls of agony masked by the genius of your work. Critics claimed you were a prodigy—however, they were ignorant of your lunacy. I’ve always known that mental illness and creative genius went hand-in-hand (and secretly, I’ve always wished I had that power), but in your hands it was destruction.

Creation. Destruction. Perfection. Addiction.

In your arms, my death shall be the portrait of a life unfed.