There is this roar inside her body, a ghastly bellow inside her mind. And all she wants to do is listen to that rage and follow its howls, stand on the ledge of a ten story building and fucking scream.

“AHHHHHHHH!” she shouts at the world, belts the wounds out into existence.

It takes so much energy and so much strength to take a breath, to breathe in the air she was meant to breathe. The strain in her lungs, the tension in her hollow bones…it’s exhausting, it’s uncanny. As she looks at this computer screen, contemplating her reasons for existing and who she essentially is, she struggles to place words and phrases onto paper, wondering what keeps her from expressing vivid, dark stories of tortuous despair, or the thickness of blood splashing against white walls, screaming to be held and saved by another. She must feel as if she can’t breathe, dying underneath this winter debris, drowning in an ocean of boulders and sharp metal chains as she sways away from those attempting to attack her open flesh. But she can’t help but feel, interpreting her traumas, breakdowns, mistrust, fatigue…finding meaning to the stones that destroy as she begins to embrace them all. She questions and wonders about it; about them, about him, about her, witnessing doubt and fear, diffidence, diffidence with things she shouldn’t even feel diffident about. And so she waits, and waits and waits and waits, for it, for them, for him, for her—to smell the roses that bleed, to come to their senses and realize the beauty they can’t seem to see, the love that still blooms in her soul.

Look at her, why don’t you?! Just look at her and say it, feel it, hear it — take her face in your bare hands and breathe love into her lips. She’s struggling among this vast façade, and it only takes your eyes to witness her battle.

She’s fighting, surviving, kicking, screaming, trying — she’s really trying.

“AHHHHHHHHH!” she shouts again, letting the wind carry her voice from the mountains to the valleys…to her beautiful God.

But the world says nothing.

And her God stays quiet.

“Shit,” she curses. “Shit.”