The pressure builds to intolerable levels and I fear explosion. Ambiguity clamped around my ankles and forcing apart my legs like the wishbone over a dinner table. First the familiar cracking of joints and then the pulling that elicits darts of pain through the flesh and into bone, causing the rest of the body to flinch. It doesn't relent and when the sockets are emptied, it's impossible not to imagine the sucking sound that would accompany such a sensation. Still, they are not yet torn free and the body is deformed and grotesque in skin that ineffectively softens the protruding irregularities. Soon enough that first tear, so painful - the worst I think, that initial opening - the skin ripping unevenly and jagged. Stripes of blood now, racing out the angle and around the bend of my knees toward shackled feet. Pure yet, the cradle of my hips clawed and cracked, finally just dismantled. Desire slapping to the surface below and wobbling awkwardly in small half-circles; it's extraction excruciating and bloodier still. Blood sprays in strings and shapes like bat wings, some edges heavier than others, and I watch with clarity the wriggling red sheets diving and struggling with space and gravity. My liquid reduced to Rorschach. The fissure expands, viscera hanging in looped ropes and sacs purple with veins still pushing tired blood. Those glistening surfaces conduit gushes of it, thin and brilliant, that drip and splatter in deafening bursts far below. Ribs are no match, fragile little embrace that they are. Love dead with the chewed-up heart, itself giving up a gorgeous display of viscous red explosions before finally resting inert. Arms find themselves disoriented, flailing and grabbing at nothing like blind and mechanical robots. Then tension on the cord, the carotids; it snaps back my head causing my mouth to lock open as if in expectation of swallowing something large and forced. No sound from the chords. Eyes disappear into the receding matter of grey, leaving eyelashes to form little rows of x's in the creased wrinkles of deflated lids. Red and hollow. The neck shreds along trails worn by a lover's tongue - my last memory of life. Finely-stranded curls alone in matted tangles of blackening blood. Finally, the skull gives way, cracked open, halting the agony.

I am so light; I am nothing.