demotomy [cw gore and body horror]
i am being devoured, and i am developing a taste for my flesh.
until recently, i would feel faint at the sight---indeed, even the thought---of my blood. my nature as meat mechanism, the delicate hydrology that drives it, the catastrophes that could befall it; these were forbidden concepts, and my vagus nerve would rescind my consciousness to protect me from them.
as it often goes, embedded within that aversion was an obsession.
now i am free to perceive and love my body as the baroque monstrosity that it was created to be. i am free to care for it, venerate it, worship it. and in the delirium of erotic fantasy, i am called to explore and understand this divine structure through brutal deconstruction, through analysis in the most etymologically faithful sense. i can't suppress a yearning to unlock from my flesh some higher aesthetic purpose than my mere homeostasis. i have a desperate craving to be ripped to shreds.
but i'm being devoured without spilling a drop of blood.
my wings are being devoured. as a rootless being, i adapted by growing wings, by adopting a mindset of self and belonging divorced from any particular place and context. the geographic extent of my immediate family spans a continent. the bonds of my profession are likely to pull me across some ocean or another. but with bloodless inelegance, my wings are being ripped from me. more and more, i am threatened with containment; i must content myself with a single-city world, for now. i don't even get any snapping of ligaments or shearing of muscle fibers to make it worth my while.
my tongue is being devoured. people don't ask me how i'm doing or how things are going when they make small talk with me anymore; at the very least, they don't make the same mistake twice. the bulk of my interaction is professional, or transactional, or entirely transient. i try not to let too much of the rot out when i speak, but i also need to vent the buildup of miasma regularly. words like "future" and "peace" don't fit in my mouth anymore. i bite my tongue, but there is no viscous, metallic warmth to soothe me.
my nature as flesh itself is being devoured. my body is a distraction from conversations, from worrying trends, from the integrity of words. my scars and zits and smells are neutralized, and i become instead a formless, barely individuated emissary of a doomed logic, a formal locus and mechanism of social disintegration. i've finally worked up the curiosity to tear into my skin, but the tissues underneath are already partitioned into cysts of sterile abstraction.
but even as my social personhood is butchered, parceled, and rendered, i have developed a taste for my flesh. the craving is too severe for anyone to pry my jaws off of it, the hunger too desperate for me to surrender my right to be meat.