Black Band

At first, it was only discomfort, a slight pressure at the seam where it clasped my arm. I thought nothing of it—things come and go, fleeting on the changing wind of destiny. Though this was different, a discomfort that stayed a little too long, the kind you tell yourself is soreness, yet its caution of disappearing tells you what you don’t want to admit to yourself. It never really goes away, there under the surface, it stays a murmur until it feels me get a little too light on my feet—tethering me back to where I belong.

The open door stares at me, a framed night—how romantically realistic. I feel its eyes, the empty doorway, and know who might step through—the only one that ever comes at such hours. My friend, keeping check on me in the night.

She comes in the deadened hours, draped in dark, her edges are as absolute as her message. Coming to press my chest, she flattens my breath, pinning me to the bed as though I might sink through the mattress into the soil itself. Her hands are cold, but she doesn’t find me worthy of staining. They hover, millimeters from my throat, and I wait for them to close. She plants another seed of the pest in me.

When I’m released, my joints are logs, and my back locks me into the concrete slab of a mattress. It begs me to fling myself up, but I lay there another hour or two, sprawling like a child in a crib, arms flung wide, waiting for motion to find me.

I wear it egotistically. The band clings to me, biting into my skin, tolling and tearing at my body, pulling taut as if to unmake me. My flesh is not the only part of me it destroys, but it begins there, at the seam where it grips. In this prison of mine, my mind corrupts. I wonder if the band will fall, when the flesh beneath it rots—an arm I could do without, just let the torment end. The pain pulses in waves, a heat that devours like fire, then chills like frost. Where the band tightens, skin cracks, splits, and festers.

The rot is slow. A cruel craftsman at work. I cannot remove it; I’ve tried—God knows how I’ve tried. My nails have clawed at the edges, tearing deeper into my own skin as if I might carve it away, but the band always wins in the end. It doesn’t show, not more than the shadows my eyes now cast, dark and plump, and my stooping back, my crooked talons and my mind curving the words of those around me into lies I can weave to make me lonesome and haunted.

I wear it, and it pairs well with the abyss in my eyes—the ones that will close nigh to my undoing. I close them in search of sleep, but the fire inside my joints reminds me of my entrapment. I cast sleep to hell and deem myself in no need of such luxuries. That’s when sleep envelops me, holds me down for half a day, as long as a quarter year, while tormenting me through her—the dark robed.

Some mornings, I wake and think I’ve won. I bounce around my little cube, threatening it to slip out of its Jenga tower. I push myself to the edge of reason, put my body to work, and sweat until I’m drenched with the illusion of freedom.

But the band is clever. It gives me ease, lulling me into a calm, and then clasps me again, just when I’ve forgotten how to welcome its burn.

They ask me if I’m well. I say, “I’m tired.”

I’m always well—because how could I not be?
Compared to others, I have no claim to suffering.

Their bands—made of tar, festering with burning glue, leave no rot behind.

I wear this black band—not in grievance for my fallen kin or the ones staring at the edge past their feet—guided by the light of the heavens.

I wear its chains because they string me to the warmth of the sun.

The black band is no symbol for mourning. No, it is my contract. The one that breathes the privilege of life into my beaten body. The one that allows me to shed tears of strain, to love—no matter how much I must hurt. I drag my body further into the sword that impales me, just to love the world.

The band will break no sooner than I break my last sweat, and thus it cannot break me, for we are one—the black band and I.