I want to scream. But I cannot. I am trapped, trapped inside of my own head and contained in these four walls, growing uncomfortably close. The pressure increases, and my skull throbs to the beat of my furiously beating heart. I pinch the bridge of my nose with trembling fingers. Clutching at the unreachable pain. Misery, anger, frustration, rage. A certain madness. I cannot breathe.
Brush to palette. Brush to canvas. Bloody smears of red oil paint, my fingernails scraping into layer upon layer of thick paint on canvases with ragged edges. Pen to paper. Just pages and pages and pages, stacks of them, heavy with....words, scrawled in a manic hand. My pen is drained of ink with the flood of thoughts tumbling out of my mind onto paper. The ink stains my fingertips and leaves ghostly traces of the cathartic outpour of emotions on my skin. They're on my lips, too, as I whisper along with the words gliding onto the page. I cannot tell if I'm whispering or screaming, or if the smell that overpowers me is ink or paint or blood. The pages are bleeding ink. I'm strangling the pen, and it threatens to snap like the neck of a fragile bird. Immediately, I think of delicate, blue-veined eyelids and soft flaxen hair. Wide-eyed innocence. And this makes me unbearably, hopelessly sad. I bury my face into the ground and I weep endlessly. The canvases, some torn to shreds by my own hands, lay scattered on the ground around me. They lay there like dead bodies, their pulses dead. Hands cold. It is a battlefield. I write and write. Of emotions. Of dreams. Of crushed dreams. Of death. It is all just exhausting. My mind is empty. I am depleted.