You are strong,

for you believe there is a

God watching over you.

I am weak,

for I know no

such thing exists.

But you are strong,

and I am weak.

I am stuck,

and

you are happy.

I leave you

with two lumps

of decaying flesh,

black and immotile.

I leave you with blood

tests, ultrasounds, and bone

density scans that all showed

nothing, nothing, nothing. I leave

you with an explosive urge to sprint - faster and faster into the distance.

I leave you with the

memories of what

I once could

do.

I leave you

with the infinite

white wall that is my

future. I leave you with

hours sat in front of a screen,

mute, immobile, while all the

while my brain turns and turns

and turns and thinks and

thinks and creates

visions only

I can

see.

I leave you

with a raging

frustration that lies

dormant beneath my skin.

I leave you with my desperation

at the microscope. I leave you

with the sympathy

on their

faces.

I leave you

with a mind that

now slows and slows,

wading through a thick sludge.

I leave you with a corpse of

bitterness and self-hatred.

I leave you with

pain,

pain,

pain.

I leave you

with rows and rows

of sleepless nights, tied down

by some invisible force that wakes my aching limbs. I leave you with hours of bargaining with God - please,

take two left fingers,

the entire fist -

I leave you

with the thought

of Leaside bridge -

a different kind

of freedom.

Tonight, I leave you behind and start anew.

My universe is my eyes and ears,

and it is the thought of

losing that universe

that makes me

quake at the

notion of

death.

In

my

happy

ending,

I bleed out

on the cold tile,

with the words

Am I Beautiful Yet

inked across

my naked

chest.

I

The

pretty girls

smile and dance

on the hot asphalt.

She watches from a

distance as they giggle

and chase colourful spirits

across the playground.

They do not dance with her;

she does not belong.

She wishes she

were one of the

pretty girls.

II

He died in March.

She watches

every morning as

the horror grows:

alone in isolation,

alone in isolation,

clinging desperately

to the image of grace -

if only she were

one of the pretty girls.

III

She

crafts

the tools to

tame the beast.

No longer will she

succumb to such impulse;

no longer will she fill with shame.

In this world of the imperfect,

she will be the leader of a

rebellion of

one.

Defiance

in her eyes,

anger in her

heart, she spits out the

fattening rules and

forges her own;

she stamps out

reality and

reshapes

truth.

With ease,

with triumph,

she wields fear as a

weapon and molds it

into an impenetrable cage;

proudly ties her crumbling

body to the tracks and

abandones it to

conduct the

incoming

train.

One step more and she will be strong;

One mile more and she will belong.

IV

Shackled in her cage of

fear and compulsion,

she paces;

she counts

the seconds,

the minutes,

the days;

the Terror grows wings and spreads -

she is filled with delusion -

The world spins on; time passes -

she despises too much,

she despises too little.

In the blackness

of her brain,

the world

shrinks

to

a

singularity:

all that matters is control.

V

It is not that

she has become

the monster,

the disease,

the terror -

It is that the monster

has always spoken

in her voice.

In the future,

wars are fought

not with men, but

machines.

The drones drop from the sky,

armed with genetically modified super-viruses that

decimate entire villages until the

rivers run red with

death

and

disease.

You!

Children

who stand at the

edge of humanity and look on -

you live during the final

transformation

of mankind.