HEART BLEEDS BLACK

Pain has a way of becoming a habit. At first, it’s something you endure, something you tell yourself will pass. But when the passing never comes, you learn to live with it by briefly escaping from it. The tools are easy to find: pills, powders, bottles, beds. Anything that numbs the raw edges of existence just long enough to forget what it feels like to live inside your own skin.

The doctor’s surgery is a joke, a relentless stream of hold music and unanswered calls. The receptionist is more gatekeeper than helper, her regular deep sigh cutting into your brain through the phone as she reminds you there’s a six-week wait. So, you stop calling. You stop hoping. Instead, you find your medicine in the aisles of the off-licence, in the hands of a family-man who sells ketamine to make ends meet, in the beds of strangers.

It’s easier that way. Easier than facing the truth that your pain doesn’t fit neatly into their system. It’s too messy, too inconvenient, and so are you, you fucking loser. The NHS is crumbling, underfunded and strangled by corruption. The people at the top call it efficiency or overuse by people who don’t need it, but everyone else knows what it really is: a slow, deliberate march toward privatisation. Toward a world where your health isn’t your right but your responsibility to cover the cost of, where survival depends on how much you can pay.

The United States calls itself a developed country, but what is development if not care for your own people? Over there, they sell your survival in monthly instalments, a subscription service for the right to breathe. Everything is a commodity to the entitled cunts who genuinely think that they live in the greatest land on the planet. It’s as breathtaking as it is tragic.

Britain isn’t far behind. Every shuttered hospital, every endless queue, every GP office turned into a cocktail bar is another step closer to the edge that cliff. And when room to breathe disappears and you fall head first into the precipice, no one is gonna catch you.

So, you pop it, drink it, smoke it, snort it, inject it, fuck it. Whatever it takes to escape the carousel of anguish. Self-medication is what you need, if you want to be a record breaker. It’s never enough, not really. But it’s something. It’s the brief silence in your head, the momentary stillness that keeps you going.

And when the money runs out, when you can’t pay for the next escape, you turn to something else. You parade yourself online, offering pieces of your life, your body, your soul for the chance to pay the rent. You smile into the camera, selling the idea of happiness to people desperate to be influenced.

Because that’s all there is now.

The influenced.