Excision

Excision

This is the only way to cure it. Would you trust someone who’s never been? Now listen: you need to get yourself a rope. Coarse preferably. Tie it as close as you can to the wound. Make it tight enough to starve it of its origin. Isolate the damage. Let the abrasion as you move distract its cause for you. Let it twist and spark and scrape away the rust into a clean flame. Take the flame and douse your fingertips as deep as you can, then deeper every time. Work your way up to the knuckle. If it scalds, good. Let it erase the infected nest from the forefront of your mind. The problem is self-constructed; unnatural, not organic on its own. It breeds when you doubt. Don’t give it that advantage.

Now do this for every time you feel it reclaim some length of you. Do it until you run out of rope, or until every laceration is covered likewise. You must become raw like the rope itself. There is no room for mercy (not if you want to heal). If you hesitate, the weed will grow back ten times stronger. It will choke you from inside without a shadow of the mercy you showed it. You already know what that feels like, which is why you came to me. Trust me: tolerance is unforgivable. If you think this sounds harsh, just remember: I’ve fought through it and survived. You do not forget such an enemy lightly.

This next part is going to hurt. Make sure to leave some slack for your wrists. You’re going to start to cut away at the rope, knot by knot, and in doing so you will wrench the weed from its source. I never said this would be simple. The tension you’ve created between your skin and the other will pry it out inch by inch from your consciousness. You’ll need to work at this continually. Weeks, months, it’s not set how long the process will take. But you must persevere. Every single day you’ll feel it fight you. And every single day you’ll carve a little bit more of it away, until at long last you will reach in and grab it by the roots and rip it out of your body triumphant. 

Hold it at arm’s length for a few seconds. Admire its insidious design, the hatred that must have gone into crafting it. Let it suffocate in the open air and shrivel in the new day’s sun. Stand tall in your victory. You are free.