Don’t you dare touch me (don’t let me be touched)

 

(Ga)rage. It says. (No, please, no. No more positivity or I’d puke. I’d be very ill.) You know what that scarlet-hued living organ beating relentlessly inside me is? Most of the time it is a heart-shaped cactus and at other times a running porcupine. It’s a vibrating lump of meat that is garnished with an expansive amount of spines, spikes and outward-pointing needles. I’ve been shaped into a mould filled, saturated, and occupied by resentment, (over)reacting towards externally and intrusively imposed bitterness. I’ve become, unfortunately, very prickly. Don’t you dare touch me (don’t let me be touched). Don’t trespass against the boundary (keep off the grass, the meadow, the sprouts, the seedlings, the blossoms, the spring). Don’t come any closer (as if I do not desire or deserve intimacy). Don’t caress me (unless you expect a cardiac arrest). The so-called ‘love’ (how cliche, how stale) spreads fairly gracefully, signified by its chronic contagion and infiltration; while hatred goes hand in hand with passion and is charged like a microdose of uranium (morphing: like ducklings, fledglings, goslings, cygnets). It’s full of potential and forces you to be driven. I’m fed with this passionate revulsion, tiny little doses per day. That is all — a consequence of reading too much of a room, of self-sabotaging too often. A means of self-protection developed by being repeatedly hurt, left unwanted, and anaesthetised. I therefore act and react via resentment. Out of hurt. Out of vigilance. Out of (un)learnings. Out of vulnerability.