translation: a bloody valentine

new ink. pride inscribed in skin.

A/N: Here, watch as I struggle for metaphor and to put into words all that my life is entailing right now. Hopefully it makes some semblance of sense.

February has flown by in a flash. It seemed like my whole life was leading up to this point, to this month, to these days.

January sprawled it’s wings, flew high to plunge slowly and spiraling to the ground. The prolonged pain of yearning and unsettling pierced through my being as the cold came and went fleetingly. Patience has never been my strong suit; like a man stuck secluded in a cabin of his own mind, I will drive myself mad in waiting. I have been known to do that. Slowly descending as I wait for the gods and time to catch up with me and intervene.

It’s hard to describe the feeling that January left in my bones. Almost an emptiness. If January was a bird aimed for the ground then February was certainly a train derailing off its tracks. But heaven knows, I do love control. And my life felt like this train was speeding past the scenery yet slowly trudging along with sparks flying. I could not keep up with its motion. I pushed and I pushed, all I could to keep moving until the controls were worthless. Literally stripped from my hands, the lever broken off, held ever tightly in my grip and there was no correcting the course. I felt myself headed straight towards the earth, the light from the sun was still ever so slightly in view but slowly became engulfed by the darkness as I grew closer to the surface.

I was helpless to the eclipse and destination of my own life. I have quite literally learned the meaning of “let go and let God” during this period of my life, during this month of pure emotional and mental endurance. There was no stopping this train as it hauled the ever heavy load.

Fear is the best way to describe my free fall into February. I was a loose cannon. I felt the darkness was my only destination. The light completely shrouded by clouds in my sky. I felt everything in my life and I felt nothing. There is something in the mind that when all comes rushing at once, it shuts down. I shut down for the first two weeks of February. Default mode, a sort of warped cruise control on a twisted road that my life has constructed was leading me into the tunnel. And I was helpless to stop it.

It’s odd to admit that my default mode often feels and unfolds itself as self destruction. If left to it’s own devices, my entire being will try to destroy itself. Isn’t this the opposite of human nature? Aren’t we built to withstand more than any mammal? Aren’t our minds and bodies outfitted with a survival instinct that will overpower everything if endangered? This is not apparently the way my DNA and biology had manifested itself.

So despite all my efforts, my hammering on the control buttons and going and doing. My attempts to be the person I knew I had the potential to be. It was nearly not enough. It seemed my being was fighting back against me. My cells and chemistry were staging a coup to overthrow the powers that be. I was so close to the life I knew I needed to live, to survive and yet I was still self-sabotaging against my own will.

I relapsed something awful. Blades, drugs and booze. My vices, my default mode, my coping mechanisms. So the ground got closer and I willingly letting it fall where it may. Many people may wonder what causes these things. What could make someone utterly willing to destroy themselves? Everyone is different. Mine revolves around a series of reoccurring thoughts that seep in, unwanted and unwarranted these days. Intrusive thoughts, they call them in the mental health field.

My intrusive thoughts are violent, deadly but only and single-mindedly aimed at myself. There’s a reoccurring image that pops bright and bloody red behind my vision, obscuring it. There are words and phrases that are repeated to me like a mantra over and over in my brain, playing like a broken projector looping itself endlessly. I became exhausted from fixating, fighting and fleeing from these thoughts. I could only wonder, how many times can someone witness an image before it becomes manifested in reality?

That reality, the unmoving and unrelenting earth felt closer to me than ever before. It felt as if sooner rather than later that this would be the manifestation of my life. Or quite possibly my life’s end. Would the tunnel ever end?

Yet I had thoughts of glimmering hope, a silver lining, a ray of sun that was still shining in despite dense darkness of damp vapors. I was set to biologically redefine my destiny. If I could manage two weeks of survival, I could quite possibly live a prolonged life. I could maybe quite literally defy death and it’s sinister intent for me.

The negative head space is hard to escape however. So it reeled it’s ugly little sideshow of images, words and thoughts occasionally scribbling in it's lines new sweet nothings. Like a flaming heart-shaped valentine sent from an apocalyptic future. At tunnel’s end, the possibility of a life away from this desolate wasteland of my mind and my being. But enraptured, it felt to be slipping away from me.

Luckily the train kept moving, through the tunnel, past the images, past the wastelands and was already on track to arrive at its destination. I was terrified of where I would land. If I was unable to biologically change then my life was certainly over.

Something about the scenery before I arrived at my destination was oddly beautiful, like the storm raging overhead. The worst storm in decades and it was thought to ravage the lands that it reigned heavily over. But instead, it saturated the grounds, poised the seeds in the ground for bloom. Like the massacre of leaves in Fall that sweeps into the dead of winter, nothing living in sight before the rinse and rise of spring that sets to open the world up for a reminder of true beauty.

This is the best way I can sum up my ascension into manhood, the hormones raging through me. Maybe my bloodied image was just a premonition of the bright red that bubbles up to the surface every time I shoot the healing substance into my muscle. Maybe my frenetic need for control was grasping for the energy that now easily flows freely through my veins in will. Maybe my black and white mindset of negativity was just to open up the colors that lace my skin in ink and a bright smile carving my face in an identity.

Maybe I am still at a loss to describe what I have been going through. Maybe none of this translates at all. Maybe I am a train looping a lone island to never be understood. Or maybe I am just starting on a new, unprecedented journey towards the land of living my life in full bloom. Maybe now with an impressive wingspan that leaves me soaring toward the darkness of the ground only to turn and be swept back up into the light.