Itch

There's these spots, just below my shoulder blades, that at one bourbon shy of inconsolable itch in such a way that it feels like I could have grown wings, had I been a better man. Maybe if I donated more, or if I treated my parents a little better.  Maybe if I called her back like I said I would this all wouldn't have happened and I would be soaring over a farm somewhere feeling the wind in my face and the sun on my back.

Instead I have this itch reminding me of what I could have been, and as I lose weight and feel so light that it seems a stiff breeze could take me off my feet it's just that much worse of a feeling.  They prepared me for the drop in weight, the hair loss, the nausea; they never told me about the awful sensation of feeling like you could fly but being unable to shake the ground. They never properly conveyed that it wasn't that I would regret that there was so much I hadn't done, but rather that there was another person I hadn't been.

The dreams are the worst, though.  I get these fever dreams from the drugs sometimes where I see myself change.  My bald head in the moonlight, my pale skeletal frame ending at my torso in a worm-like tail, crawling on my hands up a mountain like the dried-up husk of some penitent Tibetan monk.  When I get to the top I see that other me doing a corkscrew dive in the sky.  When he sees me he waves that sad sympathetic wave that people do just to say that they recognize that you're worse off than them.  That wave that says "I'm sorry that I'm fine and you have to look at me and all the fine people like this when you're clearly not fine." It, like pretty much everything else I eat, breathe or do, makes me sick, and I wake up retching, again, in this little white room with the EKG beeping away to tell the nurses and orderlies and doctors that everything is A-OK, because my fucking heart is fucking beating at the fucking normal rate for another night and that they're doing a damn fine job of keeping it that way.

I lay here and I watch that little machine count out my last heartbeats and know that it'll stop soon, and I weep -not cry- weep.  I openly weep and sob and scream, which causes me to vomit again, and so here I am sitting in bile and tears because in the end that's really the only thing that I can produce anymore.

It's not meant to be like this.  I was made to fly goddammit.

Oh god.  I just don't want to die like this.
I don't want to die with this itch.