To be both Fortunato and Montresor.
There is a sickness in me. Congenital maybe, or developed like a malignancy. Rampant, fulminant – there are not enough vessels to nourish it, and so it rots slowly. It oozes deadly toxins that collect in my brain. I am decaying from the inside out.. I fantasize about tearing into my flesh with my nails, reaching into my inner cavity and finding the hardened lump of bitterness putrefying my personality. I want to scoop it out with my bare hands and hold it up for everyone to see and say, “Here. This is the thing. This is what made me insufferable. I’m pure again!” But there’s no tumor. No foreign invaders. There is only me and the absurdity of my existence. Highly sentient meat - a bundle of accidentally attractive flesh with too much history and not enough will to keep dragging it around. Everyday, I wake up with anger and nausea. I spit on the mirror then try to clean it before anyone notices. I want to take a hammer to my thoughts, to pulp them into silence. There is no grace in this body, no romance. Only corrosion. I despise how I speak, how I joke, how I recoil from others, how I cling to my promised and then punish him for staying because his love is a defiance to the repulsion I've built myself upon. To be looked at with tenderness when you feel like roadkill is not comforting — it is maddening. I feel like a parasite in this relationship. I am dragging something pure and good — him — into my perpetual storm. I see his kindness, his joy, the way he lights up, but I am all darkness and misery. I am grey and sharp and wrong. I am poison. I will spoil the water we drink from, the bed we sleep in, the future we try to build. So here I am — too loved to die, too diseased to live. And I am so, so tired of this black fire. This rage. This autoimmune soul that eats its own host. Each day adds fuel — new reasons to hate myself. New missteps. New shame. I want to sleep until the wrath burns out and there is nothing left of me but ash. Like placing a lid on a candle and watching the fire slowly peter out, being starved of oxygen. Then…only smoke, and the silence that follows when even the self has given up.
“I am condemned to be free..”