Anxiety

I've watched you die a thousand times and today is no different.  I've sliced at your neck, I've pierced your heart and I have poisoned you and yet you still resurrect each day. I never wanted this and I never wanted you, but here you are, begging me to let you live.

I won't.  I will kill you again today.  I will tell you to kneel at my feet and I will place my hand on your tiny square shoulders and say "Not today dear, today I put you down."  And I do.  I've hung you from the ceiling fan, thrown you off the white cliffs of Rugen and I've ran you over with a hundred different vehicles.

But here you are again. I used to let you share the space inside of me.  Taking up room that I was already using and destroying it so that nothing good could come of that space again.  I used to let you tell me what to do and all the while I let you kill me slowly, devour my smooth skin.  One day I evicted you and you left.  You took your baggage and garbage and you stomped out of my skin.  As you turned you looked defeated, your black skin was losing its sheen and you were fading.  I was more than happy to see you leave.

That next day, waking up was a relief instead of a burden and it was glorious to want to leave the bed you had made me stay in day after day, wasting away. I thought that you had left me for all eternity, but I had miscalculated your attachment to me.  I walked, with hope, to the mirror to check for signs of you.  I closed my eyes in a heartfelt sigh.  The occasion didn't last long.  After snapping my eyes back open, I screamed.  You were standing behind me with a sly, slick and slithery smile on your blackened face.  "Let me in, don't you miss me?" You hissed into my ear.  I twisted away from you and ran to the door of my apartment only to find you in front of me, blocking my escape.

I sprinted to the bedroom and closed my door, as quickly as I could muster.  You were still there.  "I go where you go, little one.  We are connected and you cannot be rid of me. No, no you can't" you giggle and launch yourself at me.  I scream at you to get off me, to let me go. "I don't enjoy your company, you are destroying me," I cry "you will destroy yourself!"  You only smirk at me again before you speak quietly "I am eternal, I live in many and I will live forever in the bodies of thousands. I cannot be destroyed."  During your self involved and self loving speech, I had reached over and grabbed my drawing pencil.  I was shaking, with fear and with desperation.  I whispered to you quietly "I will kill you" but you didn't hear me.  You opened your mouth to ask what I had said as I jammed my pencil into your eye socket and then into your black, oozing brain.

You disappeared and that was the first time I had killed you.  I will kill thousands of more times before I rest.  I will banish you from the my existence, from my world. Your rotting body will have no place inside of mine, I am my own master and you will not win this war.

Sunflower

My love of sun flowers began at a very early age.  My father would plant them, every year, outside the smallish white farmhouse that I spent all of my childhood loving - and hating.  He always planted the huge ones, stalks that stood as tall as the house itself, and they were my idols.  Those tall flowers towered in the yard, looking tall and proud, ever reaching towards the sun that let them prosper.

and I wanted to be like them.  Maybe that sounds weird to you - and it is a bit queer to want to be like a flower.  Sunflowers are simple and complex and while the rose is exclaimed and exalted as an idol of beauty the sunflower takes claim over the overcoming.  Besides, what use is a rose after it's wilted?  A sunflower provides nutrition and ironically, more life.