Diagnosis

Diagnosis

I was asked to write this down, in case someone needs to know how it felt. “Evidence,” I think she called it; tangible proof that I’m sick. Like a doctor’s note as a prose poem I guess. I doubted it would prove anything, but she insisted. Let me begin.

I told the doctor I hadn't gotten any sleep. We were standing outside her classroom and she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Has anybody?" and for a split second I felt smaller than I am.

The doctor once told me a theory exists that questions whether our souls could survive in a vacuum. She said that all we truly have is a single charcoal portrait, and no one knows what the artist looks like. I thought she was only joking. But I sit here criticizing the shading under my eyes and the more I think about it the more she starts to seem right.

Am I someone invented? Did I grow somewhere in the back of your voice and rise out through another's throat?

Who are you, and what gave you the right?

The worst days feel like electrons lost as parts of me keep drifting out of reach. Cold lines cross the bridge of my nose, burning like white ice even in summer. There’s no such thing as shade, and I always told myself as much. Maybe I was born in the open, exposed from the very start to surgical conclusions. The lines are my one intrinsic trait. All else I owe like a debt to the grand Sculptor and his infallible mind.

Though I’ve thought about it, I haven’t told anyone just yet. You’re the first to know, and I’m less sure of anything. Am I just a shape pressed and folded against itself—contrived in delirium? How would I even tell?

I fear I’m too receptive. I can't block any of it; I have to look. And then I start thinking in terms too sharp for my head, and I am scorched like the Earth from the inside-out.