How to feel nothing

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How to feel nothing

Step one: Let yourself fall madly in love with the wrong person.

Step two: Fuck the instructions listen to me

Let yourself feel everything, everywhere, all at once like that film, only instead of a movie it’s a convulsing, capitulating, terrified mess of a human that cannot survive in this abusive environment

Yet, you must.

The nerves that felt so much all at once start slowly degrading as you leap into the black spiral of keeping yourself alive

Keeping yourself alive

Keeping yourself alive

Barely, each nerve that slowly dies brings a relief and a steeping pressure like a tea that has boiled over and tea leaves have exploded from the bag

You pour strong mess down your throat

It burns the numbness into submission

All of the darkest and feverish things that have been hiding down, down, deep

They cannot be accessed anymore.

The slow decay of your tear ducts feel as hollowed out as

Your heart

Creeps along my steps as heavy vines that grow and twist into my very movements.

The gradual pressure build up that sometimes happens after feeling nothing for so long makes you almost have hope

& that is more scary than feeling nothing at all

That sliver of pain that reaches out to be healed

It’s worse

Because you want it so damn bad

You have been keeping yourself looking alive & well this whole time while the spiral blackens and crumbles,

And that’s a terrible waste of feeling

But when trauma is a jagged, distorted,

Sharpened, hateful, abstracted

Cut up jumble of nothingness

And it feels like a shadow of a home you once belonged to,

Full of rags that collect dust bunnies

And sweeping messes from a kitchen floor to a stair

Wiping it up, cleaning something twice

It feels better to stay inside of my spiral of nothing than to ring it out with the water from the hose outside

I slipped from not writing these steps properly

I skipped the best part

When you write a bad poem to express something you haven’t felt in forever

After your numbness felt like home

The dreams that vanished like thin air

The feelings that overflowed and felt like hell

Straight up hell that made you run and hide like a child about to be whipped

That made a warm hug feel like a prison

Suddenly lifted a broken window

To expose that sliver of sun

& it smelled like fresh rain, grass, mildew and safety

It was something I could never outrun

You can relearn to feel something after nothing even after fifty years

It’s everywhere all at once.