BEFORE AND AFTER

1

The appointment approaches the one that's going to tell me what's wrong with me; or not. I don't know what I'll do if they say there's nothing wrong; nothing they can help with; just a weaker version of what a woman's supposed to be as if I've never known that - shape up and get on with it: no help here. The very idea of being turned away, told there is nothing wrong that everyone feels like this and simply manages better makes me lust for oblivion: do not my regular and desperate urges testify to my imbalances? Am I not a pitiful if disgusting figure, deserving of some base assistance? planning my retreat in advance from their rejections of my claims, allowing fewest possible temptations to pitch into traffic; into depths; into glass.

And if they can see or feel this bright blackness inside, whichever shade I'm of that day, will they help me? Can they? Isn't any answer at all another phrasing of the first? Here's wood, lean hard: now shape up and get on with it.
Is not all help ultimately from within, though catalysed without? Am I not to depend on my own strengths and understandings in the end? But haven't I been equipped with these same meagre rations since the first? - haven't they grown, as I did? And when, long after my own cessation size wise, will they into adulthood, and become enough for this sad soul to subsist on? Soul ha! The depths of this foul shell are swollen with fat insipid tears and the festering intransient handkerchiefs no room for a soul here; try the back of the mind: were any tatter of that suspicious ghoul's sheet still whole, it might perhaps protrude from behind some crated pallet of personal failure or complaint stretching as they do so far into the distance that surely anything possible must be in there eventually, though all the less significant for this inevitability.

2

Sometime after, now; the appointment been and gone; the second made and approaching; though it's pace indeterminable in recent days.
I am not myself.
There is sickness here, this much is confirmed. I find myself the proud possessor of such a serious sub heading as would clearly imply the need for swift assistance, yet recipient of none, or little, but a few kind smiles at my nave expectation of it.
My weary mind now so inclined begins to find more of my kind; acquaintances hooked on underachievement and ultimately self isolating misbehaviours have drawn my attention again where before it lacked in focus casting

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