Something Vague that We're Not Seeing

I keep aching like I need to write something, like maybe I could have something to say. Words running around and around in my brain, like model trains or carousel horses. But on fire. Only not like that at all, because that makes them sound somehow dramatic. This is not a dramatic feeling, but maybe a dramatic absence of feelings and I think that is why I need to write. As if the physical act (putting words onto paper/onto my skin/into cyberspace) could bring feeling back like massaging circulation back into cold fingers.

I don’t know where/who I’ve been for the last 30 days. Think about two nights ago: sprawled across my bed telling Lew I feel like a bunch of broken mirrors, reflecting people’s projections with this big hollow empty in my middle. Or like a sieve, people sifting themselves through me, leaving traces that take days to flush from my system. I need time to cleanse my system, because lately it feels so hard to exist in a body, you know? To exist and be fully present in a body that doesn’t feel like home. My head that’s crowded with thoughts I don’t recognize, like I loaned storage space to every person I’ve loved. Now there’s too much and I have nowhere to sleep, so I just keep moving.

There are days I could walk away from every human I know, disregard every single relationship, without missing a beat. Those days, losing everything seems like the only way to find myself again. Today is not one of those days, but the sensation of detachment lingers somewhere, like sinew stretched tight waiting for the breaking point. The recoil would tear a whole through everything I consider Reality. I don’t know how to tell you any of this.

I need you to understand it isn’t always like this. I’m sorry for those days my mouth hurts too much to form reassuring words, or the days my face becomes a funhouse mirror and all my perceptions are skewed. I’m sorry for the days my brain’s a trick door opening on a brick wall. I’m sorry for the week I wore silence strapped to my chest like a bomb, and you still weren’t afraid to hold me.

I don’t know how to make this better, or prevent it, or even if it’s something that needs to be made better or prevented. I don’t know when I stopped talking about my hurt in a way that made any sense. I don’t know when people stopped knowing the things that make me a human being. People used to know things, and I never had to tell them because they were there. They saw it happening and how did I get so far away from my own history?

You asked me: when do we stop telling the story of our scraped knees and wearing our wounds like badges of honor? I answered: when we stopped hurting ourselves with acts of bravery. Well fuck that. You bring me your back bent double by lonely and I’ll show you my tongue full of knots. Look, here is broken glass in my palms. Here is where love feels like splinter my body keeps trying to expel. I’m tired of being a mirror when you are looking for a window. Please, please, please. Teach me how to open?  

-b