Something inside of me is missing. Last week I fell and impaled myself on the knife in my hand trying to make a meal for myself. I wasn't hungry. I never really am.

It stung and then went numb. I pulled the smiling wound open and the skin and muscle parted as if my body was having a laugh at my expense. I looked inside but saw empty darkness. I reached inside and felt nothing until my hands clasped around my own spinal cord.

I stood in the full length mirror with my favorite shirt split down the middle in tandem with the wound below and shone my phone's flashlight in and saw nothing but the inside of skin. Hollow. I laughed and then I cried. It hurt all the same. I hurt the same way people do and I don't know if that's better or worse. But it hurt all the same and that was concrete proof I am alive, so I enter my kitchen and smear the angry wounds with chili oil until my face feels cold and numb from pain.

"Name five things you can see."

My eyes fix on the eyes examining me. Clipboard in hand but no stereotypical chair to lay back in. Just on the floor with a plush toy thousands of hands, hundreds much smaller than my own, have grappled with during these raw, awful times.

I can tell he's got a brain behind those eyes. I'm not so sure about myself. I have nightmares of popping my skull open like a can of slimy soup and seeing nothing but old clearish stains of some biological fluid on the interior of my skull.

"This isn't helping."

"It's usually very hard at first because our minds wander -"

"I shouldn't be alive," I say, and quickly shut my mouth before I get myself a mandatory hiatus from life for the next 3 days. "I'm missing everything inside of me."

"When did this start?"

I don't know. How am I supposed to know that? I never cut myself open so deep before. I always assumed there'd be meat and organ under the white dermis I spent so many times exposing and rubbing lemon into.

"I ... don't know. I just..."

He consults the omniscient clipboard. Something, some code or some string of red flags catches his eye and his bushy eyebrows furrow. I stare at his thinning hairline.

"...Miss.. Mister -"

"Valentine."

He looks at the chart again and seems to notice the discrepancy.

"Right. Apologies. Mister Valentine, it says here that you've come in to be screened."

I nod. Screened or X-Rayed or something. Maybe they can put me back together.

He consults the paper again and gives me a wry smile. "I see you've struggled with abandonment and loneliness in the past."

Sure, sure. My entrails have been liquefied by all the drugs I took to avoid feeling that grief. (There was none, though, was there? Not outside of my head.)

"We have to accept sometimes that everyone has free will. People will leave us sometimes and all you can do is ..."

I tune him out. My throat hurts and I'm scared because how can I vomit when I have no insides? Is the inside of my throat bleeding?

"... and just focus on cultivating independence and impulse control. If your medication isn't working ..."

No medication will plant a seed of humanity in me. I look down at my hot hands on my lap. Sweaty and sticky. Biologically disposed for my skin cells to try and lock with anyone else's.

"This isn't fucking helping."

My outburst doesn't faze him.

"Valentine, nothing is guaranteed in this world, and..."

I stand up on wobbly legs. My tongue comes out on its own and I heave, white frothy something spilling down my chest and onto my lap. I sob and smear my eyeliner with my bandaged forearm.

"This isn't what I need to fucking hear," I tell the alleged expert, the superior rational, a hysterical testament to what exactly happens to a child who grows up knowing that home may be where the heart is, but he has neither.

I stagger out and don't talk to the receptionist. I cry on the porch and hit my abdomen and feel it give and dip like an empty pillowcase.

None of this is fucking helping.