You tell your eyes to open, and so your eyelids say goodbye. The factory in your head never really shuts down, it just busies itself until you don't feel anything. The worker who bleeds the first time from a paper cut kisses her finger and lets it heal. The work piles up. The tenth time it bleeds, she wipes it off on her stained uniform. Work is disrupted. The hundredth time, though, she has learnt to let it flow. Bleed as you will, I don't feel a thing. Work continues, no harm done. Your feet touch the ground and take steps every day. Sometimes they kiss the ground and you are in the air, just for a moment. Sometimes they are planted on the ground, sealing your spot in the world. I refuse to budge, to melt, to evaporate. This is my weight and you will feel it, this is my body and I am still here. Your hands work around the clock. The only hand you touch is your own when the needle penetrates your skin. You're doing good, they say. Do you have a choice? Their words so light, so redundant, so mechanic. You're doing good, they say to a hundred others. Where's your vein? Oh, it's fine, they always have problems finding it. They intertwine and disappear, the blue and purple gain opacity, deeper into your flesh so that no one can abuse it. So they shove the thin metal in and move it about, banging on doors that do not open, breaking down walls that never really build up again. Your mouth opens and words pour out, laughing, assuring, telling them it's all okay. Make jokes, it makes everyone around you less uncomfortable. No one really listens, anyway. They think they kiss your bruises and make it all go away, but you feel even more alienated with every how are you. Do you mean, how far away are you? Your lips seal up like you have nothing to contribute to the world that's already drowning in voices. But words clog up in your throat and you refuse to release them. Words are a funny thing. They exist in the short breaths you exhale and disappear, they are supposed to be light as air. But they pull your heart into your stomach and they crush your ribcage as though the bones are but moths. They rust and crumble and disappear with the wind. At this point you have no words, nothing audible, at least. You let your fingers hop on the keys and you hope to purge the words that constantly seek to suffocate you. There's nothing to say, nothing to do, nothing left in you. You tell your body to shut down. Your eyelids give each other a kiss that would last for eternity.