What Makes Me Visible

What makes me visible is that I’ve learned to internalize my feelings. No one wants to hear the thoughts that circle my brain like a washing machine, turning harshly, rapidly taunting. No one wants to cheer up a desperate soul that gets depleted everyday by the crescent shaped cells that stop me from happiness all the time. The only way I can be entrapped by people, maintain a supported structure of loved ones is by pretending to be healed from this disease. Sadly I’m trapped in my mind, and that’s what makes me visible. I can’t get out because the walls of my mind are so tall, so deliberate, that they have yet to fall. I learned this year ago. Sitting in this hospital bed, strapped down by each IV stuck in me, I watch the morphine flow into my veins. I realized I internalize this all. As 22-inch gage needles, and cold harsh sharp scalpels make new wounds, fresh cuts in my spirit and tissue I treat it as its no issue. Doctors and nurses everyday ask me to rate my pain from one to ten and everyday I want to tell them the pain has no number because it is more infinite than eternity. Then after the doctors come in to tell me there’s nothing they can do but dope me up and hope that the pain goes away, the angry shadow inside me screams, swears, cursing the cells that destruct my body and the cells that replicate at the very marrow of my soul. I want to rip out these needles, shove 11 pills down the doctors throat and dope them up to the point of sedation, to the point of living half heartedly, dreaming with one eye open on reality. But I can’t, the only way to stay visible, to stay relevant, is to do the opposite and keep the hatred and envy of anyone who doesn’t feel the same burning pain hidden. If I were to say how I’m feeling, to finally turn the grey cloud that mocks me from above into a bright ray of relief, they still won’t know, they won’t even begin to see me. They’ll see me less and less. See me as an angry Black person with a lowered concept of self-sufficiency. Something I’m not. They’ll see me as a patient that feeds off self-pity and doesn’t get that there are worse things out there. They’ll see me as a hindrance, a bother in their daily morale of being a doctor and healing people. They’ll judge me without being even close to relating. So I internalize it all to remain visible.