i'm plastic and so are you

The letters swallowed me whole. Biting down with a violence that shredded every muscle, tendon, bone, and ligament. Crunching and gnawing until it was all a juicy pulp. I was not nothing. All the cells just the same, but regurgitated into a new composition. My body an anagram of what it was. 

I could see it looking back at me in the mirror. The cellular mess. Everything was backwards. All the same bits and pieces, but no structure or form. I always wondered what it was that was keeping it all together, the invisible string holding all the cells upright and in position. Why wasn’t my head bouncing on the floor, disintegrating onto the linoleum. I thought gravity pushed everything downwards.

Yesterday, you told me that I wasn’t real. And I looked at you and said that realness was overrated. Everything is manufactured anyway. At this rate, I’m 30% microplastics and 70% aging raw meat. You tell me which is more real. 

But I guess you meant real as in honest, as in you get what you see. And maybe I'm not. I don’t want to turn my insides out, to let my guts spill out onto the floor all mangled and bloody. I’m too vain for that.

Enough of this “truth will set you free” shit. I just want to drink my illusion juice in peace. 

But I didn’t say any of that to you. I kept telling you that I was sorry even though I wasn’t sure if I meant it at all. And maybe that was the real issue, never feeling sure if I meant anything at all. I was just going through the motions.

I looked at the text again. I knew it was over, but I needed to look back at the evidence, to see the final words of our epilogue. And then for one last time, I let it swallow me all over again.