Chapter 1

Before I get to all this blood, let me tell you how it came to this
Have you ever seen one of those medieval films
Where there's a prisoner in a stone cell
And he's chalking psychotic poetry on the walls?

Replace those walls with my skull
And you can get a sense of what my troubles were
It felt like some kind of phantom limb
But one that felt only pain and anger
I don't mean a phantom limb like an arm or a leg
This was more like a mouth inside
Spewing a constant stream of degrading Tourette's outbursts

I wanted to tell someone, but I was too ashamed
Anytime I did, it was always like, "You're just overworked
You should rest
Take a vacation
Get a hobby
Snap out of it"
Motherfucker, you snap out of it
I was in pain

But life needed me to seem normal
So I hid it
For years
The fact I lasted that long...

Often I'd just stare in the mirror
It looked like me; it just didn't seem like me
That fucking smirk, man
It had one of those smirks like the joke was on me

Something felt... unauthorized
Like some burglar was chipping away at the walls of my mind
Boring holes into my sanity

Then my wall broke down
Or rather, I broke down