It’s that sinking feeling again in the pit of your gut. Your stomach is churning with guilt, shame, and need. Always the need. It’s something you can never escape, for the prison is yourself. Always in that mirror, opposite of you, looking back.

They don’t know it, they can’t understand it, but you can taste shame. Like a foul burp of cum, making you disgusted with yourself. Some days it is so bad you hate the image in the mirror. Most days aren’t like that. You’re happy, ok, or flat at worst, but you can always throw on a smile that hides it all away.

They don’t know because they can’t know. You’d be ashamed if any of them saw the “you” that you feel and see in the mirror. You used to think that it was the mirror that was shattered. But now you know the mirror is intact; the image is what is fractured. Incomplete. Broken.

You deny it at first. What you are doing. What is being done to you. You make excuses and deny the comparisons. You’re not a junkie chasing a high. Except you are. You don’t have emotional problems. Except you do. You don’t regularly spiral between normalcy and depression. Another lie.

You know it could be much, much worse. As far as people with issues, you’re high functioning most of the time. Most. You think about escaping all the time, though. Letting it all go and handing everything over. There is so much safety and comfort there. Enough to drown yourself in. You’ve been lost in that before, and it would have been so easy to let it wash you away, leaving someone simpler and perhaps even happier behind. All it would cost you is thought and freedom. You could have chosen it.

You try to come to grips and accept it. Chase that intensity that drives all the pain away through a different pain. A glorious pain. But that never seems to be enough anymore. It feels good. But it’s not enough. You can’t sink low enough to drown the “real” you or the mirror image. Because there probably isn’t a bottom for you. That should scare you, but it doesn’t. Almost nothing does anymore.

So when you chat online when bored, sometimes playing, sometimes degrading yourself, it fills the hole briefly. Some try to build you up, and some like you the way you are. A few crave you to be broken completely, unable to function. Some days it’s hard to choose which voices to listen to. You want to be better. But parts of you don’t. Some parts think you can’t be. Those parts sound like your parents or people who’ve hurt you. And sometimes they feel so damn right.

You embrace depravity. Humiliation. Pain. Being anyone other than yourself. Or that self that the people on the outside think that you are. The depraved one may be your authentic self. You honestly don’t know anymore.

So when that doorbell rang, you went to the door and answered it. It’s Tony. He’s new, and he knows some of your selves. He’s not here for tools. The look in his eyes says that. His grabbing your neck says that. His shoving you across the room says that. He sees a fucking hole and nothing more. And you don’t know if that scares you or excites you. And that? That does scare you.