I wanted to rip myself apart in the most poetic way, claw out bone and cartilage until I was nothing more than a bag of skin. I wanted to tie ribbons where my skeleton would be — caution: fragile, it would say, handle with care — and walk around like a puppet on a string. I would be nothing more than the product of a proud marionette, strung lifelessly on too-thin thread putting on a show with a saccharine sweet smile.

Empty. It was the feeling of being hollow and numb and just nothing; not always but often enough. Empty came on the days after today, sometimes only for the afternoon but almost always long enough to leave the bed sheets rustled with its silhouette. Empty buzzed around in my veins, empty weighed me down, empty tied me across the bed like chains on the wrists of a convicted felon.

That’s what it feels like on the days where my lungs refused to breathe on their own, on the days my legs would not unfold long enough to support my knees from buckling, and worst of all, it’s what it felt like even on the days the sun shone brighter.

The thing was, empty was in every corner I turned to hide and every alcove I sought out for shelter. I tasted it on my tongue, felt it on the crease of my elbows, and I let it caress my fingertips into a fist. Empty consumed, empty was selfish.

And, really, there was nothing poetic about it. Nothing poetic about the way where even on the morning that promised something, all I could do was lay on my bed blinking slowly at the patterns on the ceiling. I would listen to the clock tick the seconds of the days away until the sun kissed the moon welcome and peppered the sky with enough stars to trace new constellations.

There was nothing poetic about romanticizing something that indented my stomach from the inside out and forced me to swallow the polluted air that found itself down my throat just to come up again.There was nothing poetic about how I turned fingers into triggers and how those days dragged on enough I was able to form mazes on my skin that resembled oddly like the numbers on the back of carton labels.

I used looked at girls and boys with bones for skin and holes for cheekbones and got mad at my own for not reflecting the kind of beauty I thought I saw in them, was furious at the ways in which my thighs constantly met like star-crossed lovers on a forbidden affair. I used to think of how beautiful it was to stitch together the broken just to see them rip apart, how beautiful it was to feel the static air between each hollowed out bone and instead feel exploding fireworks.

And, God, I had convinced myself it was better to see beauty in the darkness than see nothing at all.

I was wrong.