I run.

[Pan]

Sometimes I feel so much that all I want to do is rip these sensations and feelings out of me. To distance myself and banish them from ever occupying the same space as my being ever again. It makes me want to run. Not away. Run. Like life is a cage and the landscape of this world is merely the length the bars stretch out before me. I want to run to forget these limitations and push the reminder of this too small skin stretched tightly around bone and flesh away from myself. Even this body is a cage. Every breath a restriction. Every touch a constraint. Every loquacious word or low guttural sound a chain forged by the barriers of language, choking me back into this... thing. This limited existence that encases and contains me. 

I've tried to tell people, those closest to me, what it feels like. But they don't understand. Their bodies and beings are one and the same to them. They aren't sentimental objects they have a strong fondness for. Their bodies are their being. Not houses to decorate or tools used for nothing more than simple interaction or expression of their being, like this body is to me. It is stifling. And the world is just a bigger body, a bigger cage than this one and it is still not enough. 

Potential overwhelms me. I have limits, obviously, but the idea of having them makes me want to scream. I resist it. My mind bends around it like water. One minute liquid, then solid, then gas... This too irritates me. The protean nature of my own identity erodes at what I have been taught should be the boundaries of what I am capable of. It feels like too much creation and not enough destruction. Over grown potential trapped inside this too small shell. Perhaps one day I will implode. Perhaps one day my potential will have no room to fit in this form and this body will die, freeing me from this prison. 

And it echoes in here. In this body and in this world. People feel like fabric, threads plucked and resonating, sliding against one another all at once. They are too many. They are too loud. They feel like cotton and silk, like layers upon layers of yanking and pulling. They feel like fraying edges and woven patches. All I want to do is clench my eyes closed and pretend I don't notice it at all. That when someone touches my hand I can feel the surge of my being press against the skin desperate for true connection. Do they know me, when they grasp my hand or look into my eyes. Do they know that they feel like color, and texture, and sound? Do they know that they are made of silk threads and just as strong? Does this person realize that when they talk their cotton rubs against me like static electricity and it makes me grit my teeth in pain? Is it my imagination, the way I am overwhelmed by simple sensations or the presence of others?

Too sensitive. That's what I was told. That I either care too much, notice too much, think too much, feel too much. Too much. For whom? For what? I am. I feel. I experience. I learn. I grow and somehow I remain always "too fucking much." Because they cannot contain me? Because I should be pouring myself into them and they are offended that I cannot? I don't know. I don't understand. So I don't touch people. I go many months without touching anyone because it makes them louder. It makes them hurt more. I shut it out. Shut it down and away from myself.

I run. 

I run until all that I can feel is the edges of my own being and a primal snarl catches my lip on my bared teeth. I want to push back from this smothering, yell across my senses and my mind and shove my message out into the world around me, "You cannot contain me. I am endless. I am eternal and infinite. I am everything and nothing." Instead I halt the steady beating of my feet against the earth and my heart pounds its rhythm through me instead. I stand here still, afraid that the smallest twitch of my fingers or slightest gasp of breath will mean I am lost to these feelings and sensations pressing in on me. It clouds my mind sometimes and there is always this strange fog at the edges of my eyes and being. I can almost sense it. That other. That liberation. 

So I take a deep breath and stare into the distance. And then... I run.