Rotting

I am rotting from the inside out.

This is something I have always known. Or rather, this is something I have known so long that I have permanently acquainted it: I shook its hand, took its coat, sat with it over stale cups of coffee. Traded secrets so esoteric with it. It keeps me warm during the cold nights. It is my only friend and lover during the day.

I am rotting from the inside out.

It is a sickness, I think. It eats me from within. In my silence it grows. I wonder, I pray, might it wither from my vulnerability? Will I grow less consumed by the shame that crushes me by verbalizing it, by sharing it amongst others like me? Or will it destroy me before I can take it on, a warrior tackling a beast too big for their sword?

I can’t think about it. I won’t. It hurts too much.

I think about the lessons those priests and preachers taught me during both their sermons and our private sessions, in the front pews and the church back rooms. I am inherently disgusting and vile. I will never be forgiven. I am bad, I am bad, I am bad—over and over again until I cannot stand the fact that I am alive. Until I learned that serving them and serving my owner was the only way to find any purpose in my debased existence.

I just wanted it to hurt less. Please. I would have done anything to make it hurt less. And now I am…alone. My owner is gone. The ministers are gone. The other men I served to earn my owner’s praise—to avoid His ferocious punishment—are gone. But I still feel unsafe. There are still forces in my life pressing down upon me, drowning me, crushing me with their weight. I am still bad.

Why? It’s not fair. I feel childish and stupid, but it’s not fair—truly, it isn’t! A little one inside me stomps her foot in indignation, eyes ripe with frustrated tears. It must be…your fault. She is venomous; I hear her roar. Your fault. There must be something wrong with you.

But what? What could it possibly be? I search desperately for answers to a question long solved, begging therapists to please hear me, psychiatrists to please help me, medications to please cure me. I scout the Internet for PDFs of workbooks and memoirs that I cherish as ancient texts, hoping they’ll guide me to the truth. But underneath it all, deep down farther than I can touch, comes a small voice that already knows. A small voice, withering but unfailing, that is forced to go on through this physical world, stuck in the pain of past worlds now reimagined. That already died before it learned how to say anything else, before it even knew it’d had a choice.

I am rotting from the inside out.

― ρ