When I was 18 years old, I realized I had sleep paralysis. It was like being a baby again, if you can remember being a baby. Every night I could stay up without being able to move my body. I could never sleep when my body wanted me to. I was an indentured servant to my own inability to drift off into rest, only death would free me. Tonight, I was in the last ten minutes of my contractual obligation to the word and the humiliation that came with it. In my sorrows, I could feel the universe decide the exact moment it wanted to taunt me.

I felt the creeping hands fall on, maybe in, me. On my breasts. My thigh. They glided over the edge of my pink lace panties I'd bought just for the occasion. Fear sewed itself into my heart like a tailor figuring out how to mold a dress to a brides body to make her blush on the happiest day of her life.

It was the day my ex-lover and I decided to spend the night together again. After I had fallen asleep, he'd requested we stop kissing and sparing small gropes between the two of us. I never knew sleep paralysis could exist for me, I thought it was always something someone else had and not me. No one ever thinks it could be them until they have reason to believe it can be.

My body made me feel hands on my chest. A pair of lips that wasn't mine pressing down onto my own as if it were putting itself into place after a long day being apart. I would've found it romantic had I not been asleep for two hours already. My dear prince and his slumbering sweetheart, I wish I had not partook in creating and existing in the duo we ended up evolving to become.

What frightened me the most, it was the way the part I had wanted to touch earlier within the night was shoved up into my clothes now. He had not let me see it when I was awake, but now it was all he wanted to give to me. As I felt it crawl along the lace and force its way up into the pink fabric I had bought to impress him, part of my soul slipped outside of my body. I felt out of my body. The body that betrayed me by existing. But two can play at this game. I chose to abandon my body back, though I knew it had truly done nothing wrong.

Yet, I blame this body. This body that I fear to abandon, one that I dread to continue to care for. One that I now have to say goodbye to. I wonder now, what it caused that made me feel so much distain like wriggling maggots churning in the back of my throat, in the pits of my stomach. I do not blame the maggots for being in my stomach. That is simply their nature. I must blame myself for being the vessel that allowed them to cause this pain.

That is why I am leaving you, my dearest, most hated body. I am not sorry for beating the life out of you with my memories, I am not sorry for making you listen to my ramblings while they rape you again, while they fill you with so much fear you bulge from anxiety, fatten yourself up just so they can call you pretty and squeeze the darkness from your head and beg for the attention they only gave you when you dreamt. I am sorry, however, to give you up so fast, when I could've tried.

Suddenly, I no longer feel raped. I feel like the little baby that used to play with their brand new senses, zoning in and out, finding only joy in the feeling of a fever or the giddy elation of getting away with not doing a task you simply do not like. Years of neglect since your beauty betrayed you, and now you knew how to make it disappear. Simply not doing a single thing, in the end, gave you this feeling now of understanding. If you do nothing wrong and still get hurt, then why do you try?

The logic, I see now, is broken beyond repair. I zoned back in after all of that was over and found my body had scars from the neglect. I remember and can feel the moment I tried to change. I remember the very second I decided to try again. Maybe this time around true love would find me. I zoned back in and out through it, my body now became a graveyard for one unfortunate soul and body that dared to spend two weeks growing inside of me. I hope by the time I've completed my journey tonight that I can meet this unlucky one and beg them to forgive me for my inability to keep them with me, for I wanted to raise this soul and give life and purpose to another. I can feel my soul pour out of me like the blood of a miscarriage.

Then my heart started to go numb as I saw the light drain from my own eyes, ones that used to be so gem-like in the sun, ones that were the color of the growing green nature that surrounded me. I felt like I was a part of the life that surrounded me, now I can rejoin you. I fear the memory that I had to relive just to watch my heart fade from a vibrant peachy pink to the grey empty hollow that death leaves in her greedy footsteps that take from all as she crosses our paths. Now, I am in my bed, much like I am now. I am, or was, crying myself to sleep for the seventh night in a row, the one week anniversary of finding out my other half had been connecting his puzzle pieces in the wrong places after I had lost the space we'd created between us.

I suppose life was the mistake to begin with. Or maybe I'm only saying that so I don't live with the regret. Today, actual today, the day I die. This is the fourteen week anniversary of my body giving up on me like I gave up in it. I remember the diagnosis, finding out what I had been feeling sick for was. And I remember not telling anybody, because I felt so empty and alone and sad. I figured dying of a treatable disease wasn't technically killing myself. It was passive. So, I let it take me. I feel the final bit of myself slip from my stomach to my throat, to my tongue, to my teeth, to my lips. Now, I am gone.