What's Normal Anymore

I had an outing today. Apparently it's not healthy to lie on the couch all day and stare at the carpet. Who knew? So my mom packed up the car with water bottles, and hot tea, and coupons, and me. She bundled us all up and sped us off to the social centre of suburbia. The mall. Where else can you watch the jungle that is people. There's the monkeys, teenage basic girl see, teenage basic girl do. The hippopotamus is a dangerous, territorial creature. They spend their day submerging their body in fats and grease, lest their skin should crack open. The flamingos, dancing around on spindle thin legs; you are what you eat, and that's nothing, which in this jungle, means that you're everything. I perch on the edge, binoculars of lined kohl, I am the birdwatcher. I try to mimic their calls. If I could only hollow out my bones the way that theirs are, maybe I could fly away too. But today the only thing that I hollow out is my mind. I eat myself into oblivion, because self destruction is my nature. When the day is done I take off my binoculars and wipe off the camouflage paint on my face. Staring back at the carpet, I scratch at the feather's I have carved into my hipbones, wishing they were more than two dimensional.

Before the Frost

Just as I'm wondering what I should write. For my shrink to see, or me to look back on in the future, or the billions of people surfing the worldwideweb who are not reading this. Just as I'm wondering what to write I see it, the brandy glass. My mom must have put it on my bedside table, and she's filled it with roses. The last of the year too, since the weatherman has decreed that a frost is coming tonight to kill everything that is pink, and red, and yellow, and blue, and sunshine, and warmth. But she brought the last roses inside, to me.

All I can do is stare at the water that's humming through the glass to me. I know my mild, fuzzy, just out of the corner of your eye hallucinations are just that. But they still scare me. I want to tell myself it's because I haven't been sleeping. I want to tell myself it's because my body is still adjusting to the new stronger medication. I want to tell myself it's because I haven't eaten a proper meal in at least a week. I want to tell myself it's all of those things, all of those things but not me. It couldn't be me. I pray that it isn't me. But the water in the brandy glass full of end of the year roses still hums. And I don't look away.

 

Digging Myself Deeper

So they upped my meds. Shocking. Sleeping pills. More Lorazepam. Doubled the dosage of my zoloft. So shocking. Anxiety has expanded to include seasonal affective disorder has expanded to include full on depression. But that's not all folks. There's more to it. I'm not sure what yet. But I'm dying to find out the secrets locked away in my head that some shrink will unearth. Like Indiana Jones finding the Ark. So far they've been digging in the wrong place. So I just need to find the medallion and then we can get down to business.

As you can tell my rambles aren't always that coherent. I should probably explain this blog, since it was probably damn near impossible to figure out from reading. Clearly I've got a few different kinds of cray cray swirling around in the old noggin. I've been dealing with it for as long as I can remember, and right now that's actually not too far back because the meds make me forgetful. So who really knows, it could have been since Adam and Eve first bit into the snake. Oh wait it was the fruit right. Clearly I'm no vegan. But I do wonder what would have happened if they ate the snake instead. Would God still have punished them? I mean for eating something that they shouldn't have?

God punished Adam and Eve by making them leave the garden. But I think the real punishment was the knowledge that fruit gave them. How blissful it would be to be entirely unselfaware. To be free of the weight of good and evil and all the grey inbetween.

I've eaten a lot of things that I shouldn't have. Maybe this is my punishment. A certain kind of destructive self awareness. It's like all of my choices are tunnels, and I can see down every tunnel so clearly as if I was already at the end. All of the tunnels, all of the ends, all at once. The bad always outweighs the good. There's an infinite number of ways to screw something up, but only one way to do it right. So I see all these ends of tunnels that were the wrong way, and there's so many that it's overwhelming. A maze with no end. If I could just find that one tunnel that leads to the right way everything would be alright. Which is an impossible feat. And that's all just for one decision, one instant. A moment in life, blinked away. Except I stand left behind, still seeing all of the tunnels and all of the decisions, and still not seeing the right one. And it begins again. A new decision, a new series of tunnels. And on, and on.

So I stop, and be still. And if I can stop eating for long enough I can reach that level of purity and clarity that I need to find just one, just one, of the right tunnels.

Insomnia

Lie awake
I sleep awake
I go to bed with all my lights turned on
So I don't slip away
I stay awake

I don't sleep. Not really. I lie in bed at night begging for sleep. Making deals with demons and angels alike just for some peace and quiet. Because during the day it's never quiet enough. The whispers that it's not enough, that it's too much, that I'll never be. Sometimes the whispers are a hurricane that tangle you up and stop your screams in your mouth and tear your hair through your eyes. The hurricane-whispers pull you up, and down, and side to side, and in every direction at once. But there's nothing you can do because the hurricane-whipsers have stopped your screams in your mouth, they push back down your throat so you can't call out. When you feel that you can't take it anymore, they're gone. Like they weren't even there in the first place. And you have to clean up the mess, but it's so hard to do, because your hands are shaking too much, you can't get your breath back because all of the screams are still in your throat, and you know that the whispers will come back to you. But sometimes the whispers are quiet. They float down around you feather soft, so soft that you couldn't hear them unless you were trying to. Which you're not. You're always trying to block out the whispers. So the whispers float down. They might brush up against your skin, soft as a snowflake, that's when you notice. They've piled up around your feet and are ever piling higher. Until you can't move. The whisperfeathersnowflakes are burrying you and you didn't notice until it was too late. But how could you? If you listened to every whisper you would go mad. So you don't know which are the ones that are dangerous. These are the daytime whispers. The hurricanewhispers and the whisperfeathersnowflakes. These are manageable. It's the whispers in the night, that come to you in the dark, these are the dangerous whispers. They speak of the words you try to forget during the day. But alone in the dark you can't. They swallow you whole, and envelop your body. They snake their way across your skin, looking for some weakness, some imperfection, a soft spot to pierce through. The whispers creep under your skin. Piercing through to the surface with their thorns, and rooting down into your viens. The flowers that bloom are the lies you tell yourself in the morning. 

So I don't sleep. Not really. The whispers are there, always.The whispers.

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