The Predator

It is darkness. Darkness in your blood, and in your body, and in your bones. It’s black fire in your veins and a low-burning undercurrent of anger. It’s sadness, and it threatens to surge up at any moment. Swallow you whole. Leave you sobbing on the ground. It takes you in slow, intimate waves, washing over you in nausea and night and pain. Seizes your muscles and locks you away, burns the brightness out of you with a cold, predatory intensity. Vicious, it strips you bare and wears you down, cuts into you until you curl inward and then it takes your edges too. It leaves numbness in its wake, a gray gauze the world cannot penetrate. It is there in your blank face, the distance your glassy eyes cannot travel. It’s exhaustion, and leaden bones that drag you deeper, pull your soul out of your flesh and grind it to dust under your aching feet. It is that heavy, heartsick core at the center of you, dimming your light and dulling your echoes. It is creeping over you like death, stealing your lightning thoughts and your thunder words until all you crave is oblivion. It is the abyss under your thoughts, threatening to engulf the tiny, flickering flame that is all you have become. It presses closer every day, devouring you piece by piece. And slowly, in the end, it smothers your soul.

As the waters close over your head, as the heartbreak drowns your lungs, it is still the one word you cannot say.