You'll Not Feel the Drowning

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mind lately—about the hows and whys of it—exhausting introspection and I blame it on the general psychology course I’m taking because before now I never thought there was such a thing as knowing oneself too well.

Sometimes I’m afraid I’m crazy. Schizophrenic and narcissistic and psychotic and masochistic and all the other ‘ic’s one would find in my textbook. Martians are stealing my mail—my aunt said that—or the demons are breaking into my mind and planting seeds that grow and grow and grow, choking my brain and I couldn’t stop it if it was true. Sometimes I even suspect I might have my own howling Rabbit, like the one who cries for Truddi Chase.

I know it isn’t true; I am relatively sane. But I wonder sometimes why I’m afraid of it not being that way anymore. Crazy people never know they’re crazy, so what’s the difference?
I wonder why about lots of things, though.

Like, why is guilt an awful tumor inside of me? I don’t even know what for; its just there and there and there and I pray for forgiveness but I think maybe its my pider that feeds the disease.

Dead pets. They feed the guilt too, somehow. Mortality right before my eyes and I know decay will start and soon they will be nothing when they used to be my friend; my loyal charge.

I’ve seen lots of them—dead things—and just thinking about the empty eyes that were once so full of expression, and the stiff bodies that used to be so alive and warm…I remember and guilt wells up inside of me.

The stiffness—the perfect stillness on the table or in the coffin—is what disturbs me the most. Catatonic, strange and I know death is something God’s creatures were not meant for because, besides the sadness, it just feels wrong—a bizarre darkness.

And because I can’t fully see the stillness. I look and I know and that’s how I see it enough to be disturbing, but if I stare a moment too long I think I see it move—whatever, whoever it is—my eyes tell me I saw it breathe and the more I stare and say to myself ‘it is not moving’, the more my eyes play cruel tricks on my brain.

I saw my great-grandma in her coffin all surrounded by the white silk and pink lace, and the yellowish lights made her skin look like wax. I looked and waited to feel sad—cause sometimes proper feelings are elusive and you have to call them up—but before it came I stared in rapt shock because I could have sworn I saw her move. More than tricks, more than tricks and please don’t touch me I’m telling you she’s breathing!

Half my mind was screaming while some buffer reined in the aftershock and convinced me it was just my eyes playing pranks, so now let’s just go sit down and do not laugh—because I could feel hysteria rising in this strange room that was so white white white and smelled like mothballs…and I was wearing heels and I just felt dirty.

The room was so clean it felt dirty, and in the back of my mind I saw Grandma Pew waking up once she was covered in the earth because a part of me still believed I saw her breathing. I’ve always wondered why they do that to me—my eyes, that is.

Why they lie to me. My ears, too. Sometimes I hear someone call my name but I turn around and there’s no one.

And my mind lies, likes to taunt me. Go to sleep and dream and it says ‘here you go, here’s what you’ve wanted all these years. Look, your every prayer answered and everything you never thought would happen just look, it’s yours now’. In those sweet dreams I’m so happy I cry, and then the tear-salt on my lips wakes me up.

That is a profound sense of loss, you know, what dreams can create. I wake up from those happy dreams and my stomach hurts with it because in my mind I had it but its gone when I open my eyes.
I’ve dreamed of death, too—the deaths of people I love. And in the dream the feelings are real; I’ve experienced them. I know what it is like in that single moment, when you realize your mother died and there will be no more long talks in the passenger seat, or your best friend died or the lover you never had or both them and your whole family all at once.

The utter devastation. What you fear the very most. It puts rocks and gravel all in you and chokes your heart with barbed wire like a tacky tattoo. So heavy, you shatter bone as you fall to your knees. What else does that?

Nothing. Why?

And why, no matter how much I doubt I’ll be able to fall asleep, can’t I bring myself to take a full dose of Ambien? Because somehow it feels like suicide.

And I have too much to do before I die. Even though I feel purposeless sometimes there are things I need to do.

I need to go to Africa. I need to convince someone that God is real. I need to fall in love, shave my head in mourning and I have to walk barefoot over a bed of hot coals. I need to find out what I’m supposed to be doing; I need to wait and see if the choices I’m making right now are mistakes or not.
I need to see how things work out. I like books and movies with no resolution, all open-ended and real. I like them because they are honest and things don’t ever really end, don’t ever resolve.

But I can’t help wanting my life to resolve before it ends, however impossible that is. It isn’t possible because as long as one is alive there is a future, and as long as there is a future one needs to constantly preparing for it.

There is no ‘now’ anymore. There are just brief pit-stops on our way to whatever it is we’re getting ready for. Because even that, once it arrives, ceases to be the most important thing because already our minds have moved to whatever might be next.

It makes me tired, just thinking about the fact that there is no destination. There will never be a time for me to put away projects and goals and just rest, knowing that my work is done.

There’s a pendulum swinging from my heart, stirring stirring flipping my stomach and it seems that every thought I have gives the weight a push so there is never peace—just inner turmoil and something always dragging at my conscious. I’m starting to tremble from holding it up. A structure buckling, creaking boards and cracking windows and tired, tired, tired.

Think of a bird in a cage, by the window. Or the little brown mouse that scurried across my ratty dorm room carpet; my pet for a moment before re retreated down into the safety of the vents.

Think of all the poor bird can see, taunting him there beyond the bars. He sees today the sky is blue blue blue and clear and look, the breeze is nice; perfect for flying. He sees the rain, the puddles outside and how he can no longer splash in them before darting under some bush or into a tree—any one of his choice. He sees the stars at night when the moonlight casts ominous shadows over him and reveal to him what he really is—a prisoner.

No longer just a bird, now a prisoner, too, he realizes then that song is pointless—why go on pretending to be a beautiful, proud bird when his wings have been clipped and here he stays behind metal bars? Why be an enslaved entertainer to satisfy some rich exotic’s palate?

There are no friends here to call for; no lover to sing up to his branch. No branch. There is no warm sun on his back while soars through the air as he looks for berries or worms; no signal to stimulate his song simply for the sake of singing it. His freedom is gone, and with it, all of the reasons he ever had to sing.

So he doesn’t. An animal, not even aware that it is reasoning, acts logically. There is no reason to sing anymore. So don’t sing. Song was flight, song was the hunt, song was community.

Flight is gone. The hunt is gone. Community is gone. Because he’s caged up and he doesn’t realize that he is sad because those things are missing, but he is.

And after a few months of a cage and the bird has stopped calling to his friends and mate because he’s realized they can’t hear him. He’s stopped singing at the slightest hint of sunlight penetrating dusty windows because he’s realized that it is a ray of sunshine that is not for him. It will beam down on the ragged carpet and the bird will watch dust motes dance in the golden haze and they’ll remind him of the bugs he used to chase as he sang, but when he realizes it is all an illusion and that now it all happens still but outside of him somewhere—then he stops singing for good.

Animal realizations, foggy ones; but ones that do indeed happen even if the bird isn’t conscious of them at the time. He still displays the symptoms, though. He stops singing.

There is nothing more sobering than the sight of any creature resigned to its fate.

A bird who as stopped singing.

A mouse caught in a trap, still alive but given up struggling, just staring at you with eyes hard like jet stone; stoic. As if he knows that you are at this moment on your way to finish him off and there is nothing the animal can do about it. So he lets you.

A lamb to the slaughter.

A man at a desk stacked with papers, his shoulders hunched with burdens. Clocking out at six, his mind is on nothing but what needs to be done the next morning when he clocks back in at seven. Aware of that repeating pattern stretched out behind and before as far as the eye can see and he follows it unquestioningly because that’s just how it is.

I’m tired of being resigned. Sometimes I have to be and I can never escape it on days when I am just too tired and my head is full of cotton and there’s pressure building and building and just go to sleep…but when I can, I’ll fight it.

But when thoughts pile pile pile up until they run out my eyes I need something. I need to run across the highway at rush hour or chop at my hair with giant scissors or jump somewhere, off of something not high enough to die but high enough that if I don’t land just right I risk injury…I need to feel as chaotic outside as I do inside.

Because fear is like bleach in a high-pressure hose in my mind, acid to burn away everything else. Exhilaratingly painful; scrubbing raw and bleeding but afterward I feel clean.

Those things aren’t practical, though; aren’t considered healthy ways of dealing with stress.
A hot shower will suffice; will leave me clean enough to function another day, inside and out.
Not just warm; not just steaming. Hot, to a degree just before the point of unbearable.

I stand right beneath the faucet, fifty thin jets of water stabbing into my scalp. I can almost feel blood rushing in to flush my cheeks as I scrunch my eyelids shut tight. The lava spreads through my hair, fills up every tangle until it spills down my forehead and my neck and over my ears, burning burning burning and I can feel every place the liquid fire touches as it swiftly engulfs me.

Streams run continually down through my bangs, heavy and feathered smooth against my face from the water pulling them down. I cringe as I wait for my sensitive face to grow numb to the heat engraving rivers around my eyes and dripping from the tip of my nose, rolling over my cheek bones and between my swollen, parted lips.

It hurts but I don’t move. My fists are clenched, knuckles pressing against my hipbones but I don’t feel the dull throb the pinching creates because the burn is still too fresh, cascading from my head and neck to scald my shoulders all the way to my toes; to purge me of the thoughts threatening to swallow me up.

I imagine the water burning every germ from the surface of my skin as it flows down, then the steam penetrating through pores to flush out the impurities inside. I imagine being clean and sing in my head nonsensical lyrics, eerily happy like Alice in Wonderland.

I play the music forcefully in my mind, filling it up until there is room for nothing but all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, sewing Humpty-Dumpty’s wounds shut again.

And burning.

I lose all sense of time. A nursery-rhyme trance, an escapism hypnosis.

It doesn’t satisfy like some vices but usually by the time the hot water’s run out and Humpty’s bleeding has stopped, I feel like I can step out again and leave my demons to run down the drain.

Usually.

Sometimes it isn’t enough. Sometimes something in me needs to scream; alarm bells need to sound and say Do something Anything Life is Leaking away can’t you feel it?!

When I plug up the drain, lie down submerge as liquid fills every hollow—air is pushed from my ears and nostrils; water weaves itself between my eye lashes and threatens to sting.

Hush.

Muffled vibrations engulfing my head pulse rapidly over the surface of my skin.

Quiet reigns for moments, the silence working with the feeling of floating suspension and it is timeless. I am timeless.

Until the screaming begins. The screaming of my lungs for air—air and there are the bells in my brain screeching and after a few seconds of endurance the water rolls back in a single wave from my face and down through my hair and with a gasp of oxygen—the ultimate drug; the addictive gas whose withdraw no one can survive—I am satisfied.

I step out and my skin is bright red; looks raw as if I’ve passed through fire and left my old skin behind, blistered and melted away so I can feel fresh and be clean again.

The red makes scars stand out brighter, though—a few darker but mostly they are pale lines and once again I wonder fleetingly if they’ll fade as the years pass; how much various ones have already faded since I sustained them.

Some of them still sting when I’m cold. Those are the ones I know I’ll still see after a hot shower when I’m forty.

A reminder of burning submersion remains with me, the sting in my eyes, red-rimmed and blood-shot. It gives me the feeling of having had a good cry, the kind I crave but cannot seem to accomplish.

I’m full of screams—happy, angry, excited, anguished—but I’ve forgotten how to shout. This is all I have, my fingers on the keys or wrapped around a pen or picking the strings of my guitar; all that keeps the pressure from causing me to explode.

I want so much to feel clean and fresh again—without blemish.

Purification. Refinement by fire.

I haven’t achieved it yet.