It ended and my universe collapsed. My skin sagged off my body, pulling downwards off my bones as if millions of grasping hands had emerged from the ground and each taken a hold onto me, yanking earthward back to where they came, but since I am a tangible being and not one of them (not like them at all) my body cannot follow them, and so my skin is pulled off my frame like a degloving.

In this moment I realise two things:

1.

My skin was the final layer in my armour. My final defence againse all of this ceaseless pain. Now that it is gone, I am open and helpless to absorb everything that has been assailing me. How will I react? Will I be crushed completely under relentless attacks so that I become infinitely and immeasurably small? So tiny that I become essentially meaningless, existing at a scale so insignificant so as to not exist at all? Or will I absorb the unceasing stream of violence I am subject to, growing larger with every blow until I am a bloated mockery of myself, gorged on only the worst things I can have possibly experienced? In this case, my body would be a towering and shameful mass, filled to the brim with a soup of terrible events and visible for miles for everyone to see and observe and judge. My worst secrets exposed on my skin and oozing from my bursting flesh.

2.

My skin - alongside being armour - also had one other reason for existing. It was a canvas on which I could paint my agonies and hate. A tool with which I can express that which words or everyday actions could not. With every crevice I have carved into myself my story has become one step closer to completion. The gashes I open in myself are, on an individual basis, a mechanism through which I cope with the relentless attacks mentioned prevously, but collectively they are my greatest work. A sculpture or painting turned inwards that only myself and those I am intimate with can experience. Now that I have lost my skin, it is as if I have lost not only my life's work but also my only means of expressions. Surely without this I will become a gap. An empty space needing to be forcibly filled by some horrific act of violence.