Madness.

There was a time when a man locked me up in a room and made me listen to the same song hundreds of times, until I started to lose it and began befriending crickets. I fought for my sanity for a long time, but the longer he finagled me to stay awake, the more entrenched I became in a state of somnolence so reminiscent of a dream, I could no longer tell consciousness and unconsciousness apart.

That's when I went mad.

I don't know how insanity is defined but I know exactly when I feel it. I know exactly how it feels on my skin. I feel it in sanguine responses. I feel it when I am ensconced in elation as I am bleeding to death. A trick of the mind, I know, but it doesn't matter that I know; believing in magic, even when you have proof of the trick, that's madness.

"I want madness," I tell my lover, as he pierces my cheek with a needle, "I want to be mad."

"Aren't you, already?" He asks, "Look at what we're doing, my love."

"You're stabbing my face," I say, as if he needs a description of the very thing he is doing.

"What else would I do with you?" He says, "My mad little voodoo doll."

"Are you a voodoo doll if you prick your sentient remains to torture the tombstone of your soul?" I ask.

He doesn't respond. Or maybe I don't hear him as my eyes roll back to the back of my head and the familiar elation of losing my sanity fills up my eyes. Is this mad? Are we even allowed to say that about honest sexual pursuit and exploration? Sometimes, I want to say it. I wish I were a gormless fool, one so inconsequential and idiotic that my ramblings wouldn't elicit any response from anyone at all, so I could say some things I have been afraid to say. But then again, perhaps I am that fool.

"I think this is mad," I say out loud.

I am croaking through the small gap in the middle of my lips, the only bit I can still open through the sharp metal holding my lips together, it hurts my lips to move them even a little bit, but I talk. I wouldn't speak if I could run my mouth freely, I talk because it physically hurts to make these words. The pain throne in my lip and jolts my mind like a stun-gun. Even for all the pleasure in the world, it's insane to hurt yourself this way. I know I am not supposed to say that either but I won't speak for anyone else in the entire world, just let me say all I want about me. I don't see how pleasure extends so far it begins to undermine all biological instincts of self-preservation, I don't know how it extends so far it fights evolution, I don't see how sanity could have led me here.

I know exactly who led me here. It's not him, nor any of the people who came before him, if anything I brought them here, this is just what happens when little girls who mindlessly stick pins into headless dolls grow up. They grow to realise they were those dolls. It was her, the mad little voodoo doll I hid under my bed and called by my name. I didn't hurt her to cast evil upon anyone else, I hurt her because I wanted to hurt myself. I clad her in attire I would I would adorn one day and I hurt her with all the pain I craved. She couldn't feel it, it didn't matter, did it?

But if she could.

Like I can.

She would have been driven mad.

I drove myself mad for the pain. I know the world counsels for caution and restraint, and I would wholeheartedly embrace those things, I would, but I scried the future from a little hovel under my bed, and I know I am the monster who is destined to haunt myself. I don't know how this ends, I wouldn't pretend to believe in that much magic, but I know it does end. That tortured little doll she gets to be forever, even in her mangled state of complete destruction she gets immortality, but I have no choice but to come to an end.

And so now, before I cannot anymore, I must be mad. As crimson reason pours out of my skin and down my face, I feel more like myself than I ever have before; in this mania of liquid thoughts and colourful scents, the world makes more sense than ever before. I know I shouldn't say that, I shouldn't aspire to madness to explain a tawdry addiction to the substance of pain, but I don't believe that. Later, I might but not here. Not now. Not like this. Right now I know that I'd hate to die, still holding onto my sanity, I didn't stab my little voodoo doll just to grow up to chase sunshine.

Extinguish the sun.

Bring me the night.

In night there is madness, and in madness, am I.