This week I’ve been seeing images when I wake up in the middle of the night. Usually in the form of slow, flesh ripping decapitation, or bullets entering non-vital parts of my body, like my arms. Not of self-mutilation but mutilation of the self. These images, in some form or another, have followed me my whole life, and went away after I started therapy1. Now they’re back.
There’s been a new one lately though.
I have a one-inch thick, two meter pole through the heart, sticking out perpendicularly to my body in both directions evenly. My heart and lungs have grown and healed around this pole, and even a gentle impact on either end, due to the mechanical-force multiplying nature of the fulcrum that is my heart, could disrupt my organs and kill me.
So as I’m trying to fall asleep again, I see myself going about any regular day, stumbling around with this unwieldy pole, hoping I don’t trip, and no one bumps into it.
- Or perhaps, co-incidentally from something/someone else. [↩]