A disease. It is a disease. 

You stand in front of a mirror as the texture changes. The changes are so unbelievably subtle and delicate that it is entirely inconceivable for anyone else to notice them, but you. Nonexistent layers of skin are suddenly folding on top of one another, like a transform fault, lifting the Earth above it. The plates shift and slip, only the result is different on the human body. It isn’t real. You’re not seeing the end result of plate movement, the faultline where the Earth violently, yet somehow beautifully shifts. It’s the bitter whisper of what a man thoughtlessly said in response to the most insignificant of utterances. It’s the culmination of foolish, frantic lies, amassed through time as a means of bringing you to this mirror. To this moment, where you sit in judgment of the abundance of faultlines that are emerging on your face. Despite your finest efforts, you’re helpless in making them recede, or preventing them at all. Oh but how badly you wish they would dissipate like frightened and fragmented sounds. Then you could sleep, but to wake up and be brought to this mirror once more, all the while you were positioning pockets of skin in your sleep, meticulously going through each calculated motion until it’s where you believe it should be. What no man said brought you here. Your position is correlated directly to your refusal of external assistance. Or your refusal to acknowledge that such assistance exists. And instead you stare at the folds, the faults, every night for hours. What should be nourishing you is left untouched, or worse, discarded after it was received, after a complex network of falsehoods was conceived to ensure its fate. And the ones you love and the ones you like are merely obstacles and obstructions to your deemed utopia of a faultless plain. But this utopian society would not cease its futile quest for perfection upon achieving a faultless plain. It would recede to a sinkhole, and collapse unto itself until what remains is nothing. Dark matter. And as the ones you love cry, attempting to coax you back to the world of imperfections, you smile. Their insults and harsh words are the compliments that warm your heart. They fuel your utopian aspirations and they’re entirely unaware of this. And if achieving this unattainable serene society means severing each valuable tie that somehow remains as part of your plagued and sick mental framework, then so be it. You would rather toss and turn, fold and fault, slip and strike every single night until your plain assumes the position you desire. You will stare, you will lie, and you will hate to love every single moment you do.

The thing about using your mind to defeat a mental problem is that your mind is where the problem originated. Thus, I will wake up with this, I will walk with this, I will think with this, I will eat with this, and I will sleep with this every night for the rest of my life. But it will not lay one infected finger upon my body, not for one second for the remainder of my life’s duration. I will fold and fault, slip and strike no longer. I said that to myself a while ago. It wasn’t a lie then, it’s certainly not a lie now.

I still live with this disease. I will always live with this disease. But it doesn’t touch me, it doesn’t affect me, it doesn’t move me to alter my behavior in any conceivable manner. Years ago, it was right beside me, pulling my strings, conducting my downward spiral. Now, after admitting defeat at the hands of nothing but my own mind and force of will, it’s still there. But it sits, deeply saddened in the corner. Flicks a quarter with its thumb. Looks down, hat covering its eyes, smirking as if to say “well, you got me this time.” It watches me to observe whether or not I will give it any indication of its return, but this is merely wishful thinking on its part. After years of being on the bench, it knows better now. It’s given up on me. And I, I gave up on it a long time ago.