Stonebird

To engage with anything or anyone on the outside, I have to get through an unimaginably solid barrier of intense, internal burning pain, that consumes all my muscles and expands outwards beyond the physical limitations of my body, so that no contact is bearable or pain free. Not only do I have to endure the intense, overwhelming, never-ending burning, but also the interminable throbbing, itching, crawling, stabbing sensations, the intolerable, continual emptying weakness, the blank, numb, nothing that consumes every part of me. My mind is a solid fuzz of darkness where thought and colour and flowing ideas might live; once lived, yet now need to be dug out, if at all, from the mine of fog that fills it. My eyes, too blurred to focus clearly, the muscles dancing around when they should be steady or staring, immoveable when they should be able to contract and focus, make my vision darker, smaller, fuzzy, diminished in perception and clarity. Movement, then, around me causes to...