I awake in a place without light, an endless bank of fog rolls impenetrable overhead, carried by a frozen wind that carresses my body with its bite. A sempiternal personal wasteland imagined and realised in the same subconcious breath, woven into every fiber of me, the beginning and end flowing seemlessy within the other. A perpetual nightmare fuelled by fear of it and engima of being without it, a smothering safety blanket draped over reality, obscuring and giving form simultaneously. Trapped by my own coping mechanism, lost in my own escape route, screaming for help with a voice never able to be heard outside, muted by the fear of it being heard. A tumultuous mind given agency by the stigma from a society purporting to support. The scarcity of tolerance and understanding exacerbating a self-sustaining injury – no limbs may be broken but I still cannot hold myself. An invisible wound so plainly in my sight, an unending hostile landscape only I can see. My outstretched arm can find no warmth, searching for a reprieve from the poison that courses through me. It may be hard to undestand but harder for me. A renegade me determined to self-destruct. Judgment and disapproval serving only to exile an outcast.
A cold society cannot thaw a mind frozen in fear.
A blind society cannot see a soul shrouded in darkness.
A hateful society cannot save a heart starved of love.