Skin

I left through the ceiling before the rest of me understood what was happening.

One moment I was inside myself. The next I was somewhere past the light fixture, watching a body that used to be mine go completely still. I’m a rabbit beneath a hawk’s shadow.

Nobody tells you that freezing feels like being evicted from yourself. That the self just gets the hell out and watches from somewhere safe while the rest of you deals with it. I saw everything from up there with this horrible, perfect clarity I have spent years trying to drink away, sleep away, lie away.

Afterward, I climbed back down into myself like returning to a house after a break-in. Everything was technically where I left it, but nothing belonged to me in the same way anymore. I told myself that didn’t happen. Over and over until it started to sound reasonable. Go to sleep. You’re fine.

But I couldn’t sing myself to sleep.

My body, traitorous animal that it was, had its own stupid, humiliating logic. And it responded. How do you live in something that betrayed you like that? How do you shower in it, dress it, carry it around, pretend it’s yours?

You don’t.

You just start hating it quietly. You get very good at the logistics anyway. The shower, the mirror, the clothes, carrying it from one room to the next.

I hated the way it responded. Hated that survival could look so much like permission when replayed slowly enough inside your own head. It looks like being funny, being fine, being the one who holds it together. It’s maintenance. You wall something rotten off inside yourself and learn the layout around it, where to walk, what not to touch. After a while the detour just becomes the house.

The whys came later.

Someone brushes your shoulder. Someone plays with your hair. Someone caresses you. Every window blows open, glass everywhere: Exhibit A, B, C, every goddamn thing that ever touched you, filed raw in your traitor nervous system.

Why did I.
Why didn’t I.
Why did my—

Blame has a fastest route home. It’s inward. You tell yourself the part that left through the ceiling was a coward. A deserter. Left you there rotting. You tell yourself you should have stayed. Should have fought. Anything except lie there like a rabbit counting feathers. And you punish yourself for that. Because staying would have broken you. And you hate that you know that.

At some point the suppression became a whole structure I was living inside. I built an entire version of myself it had never happened to. That version was functional. Likeable even. Just completely hollow and exhausting to operate.

I still see it sometimes, that part of me that went to the ceiling. For a long time I hated it for leaving. I thought it abandoned me. But I think it went up there because it didn’t know what else to do. Carrying what it could. Staying there because coming back down too soon would have broken something that couldn’t be fixed.

I couldn’t sing myself to sleep.

But I’m still here. Skin and all.