The Pith :: Therapy [1]

My eyebrows felt as if they were trying everything within their power to knit together. Maybe they had dreamed of one day becoming a cozy sweater. Frowns had become such easy arrangements for my face to form that they manifested quite naturally. It was the way my face just was for the past three years. I don’t believe whoever came up with that “it takes more muscles to frown than to smile” crock. They must have meant that more muscles become relaxed in a frown for my cheeks would ache as if a soldering iron was used to keep the corners of my mouth curled up when I allowed smiles. Paper curls up, too, when it’s burned.
            When I would get angry – beyond angry, livid – my fingers would gain thirty years. Just like a weathered old man suffering from a severe case of arthritis, the tendons in my hands would raise and tighten, I could feel my muscles stiffen, and my fingers would gnarl up and freeze. I was scared of breaking my fingers if I were to try too harshly to flatten them out. My hands would tremble and the shuddering would pass on to my arms and eventually to my entire body. My jaw would clamp and refuse to release any sound besides a primal grunt from my throat. Somehow, a pencil would be able to weave its way between my seized digits like a lioness through the tall grasses of a savanna. Like a lioness, my pencil was on the hunt. Specifically, it preyed upon paper and expressions of spiteful thoughts. Words exuding a deep loathing were put to a page in a way that they could never be recalled. My poems could cut the heart of Brutus on the day of his betrayal: