There is a burning in her chest, imaginary chains wrapping around every joint. Her muscles seize and shiver and shake. Not unspoken but unheard. Echos that drift from mountain tops and zip lines and a jump from a height. Let’s start with the apple.

It’s sits there. And she watches it, closely, slowly. For hours, days, weeks, months even. She watches it turn from red to brown to black….to dead. There is a tremble in her fingers, a hollowness in her bones, a screaming in her mind that will never cease. Let’s start with the apple.

It grew deep in the orchard, miles away and secreted in the highest branches of the oldest tree. Sweet flavor written in its DNA, a savory crunch of its tight skin wrapped over fragile core where the seeds are tucked inside. The heart. It’s not to big, not too small, perfect in its stature. A great satisfaction when teeth breach on ruby rose.

But it dies the moment the stem breaks from the oldest tree on the highest branch. It’s life cut off and dead. Endless in its existence till the outside forces it from its home. It sits there, unbitten, unwashed, unaccompanied.

The lone red apple with the lone table watched by the lone girl. It dies under attentive eyes, blank smiles and bleeding knuckles. Let’s start with the Acid.

It sits inside of her. Bubbling from her head, traveling along veins and vessels. Mixing in her heart and settling in her bones. Burning every thought in the back of her eyes and the voice screaming in her head. A mirage inside her skin that keeps her toes till she falls into nightmarish sleep. It’s hot. Boiling and boeing and burrowing inside her bone marrow where it sleeps and slumbers until the exact moment where her guard falls and it hurts. Let’s start with the acid.

It’s bad thoughts in her head, impulsive actions taken in the darkness in her room. Blood on her knuckles, bruises on her skin, split lips and jolting breaths and a beating heart that skips, skips, skips. Trying to break free from her ribs. Ripping past her panting lungs and her racing blood to land on a heap while he mind is blank for the first time in too long. Russian roulette with her own body as she pushes and pushes and pushes till she can’t push no more and she is more of a danger to her self then to everyone else.

It’s created inside her, nurtured by her head and harbored in her heart and taught to walking in her veins. The acid hurts just as the straps on her legs or the thin air in her lungs and it burns and burns and burns till she in only ashes and scars. A shadow of the girl who was to be and is is now. Let’s start with the addictions.

It wasn’t always like this. She can remember the…before. Before she felt the adrenaline flush through her system and she learned how good it felt to move till the air hurts in your lungs and you mind begins to fog and your body sways to the unheard song in her ears and the beat of her fast pacing pulse.

She hikes up the tallest mountain, stands at the end of the cliff and stares down at the world with empty eyes and empty mind and gleeful smile. She falls off the highest bridge with fear in her heart the bangs against her rib cage as she grips the straps on her body and the chains on her joints.

There is a burning in her chest when she remembers the before. Evaporation escapes from her throat as her bones smolder and her heart shivers and her diaphragm quivers. They rust and creak against her skin as she is aware with a new bruise and a black eyes and a smile on her face like the sweetest of apples pulled from the oldest tree and the drip drip drip of acid on skin and melting away to see blacked bones and dead eyes and she is addicted to the pain and the fear and the adrenaline lacing her blood.

Let’s start with it all and see if you can name the lone girl with the voices in her head begging, begging, begging…

…for it all to end.

Let’s start with the unnamable names and the ceaseless titles and diagnoses and too bright hospital lights.