An Empty Flat

So today I’ve had plenty of time to think. I lay on the couch, draped in my brilliant blue silk doona from Vietnam, and stared aimlessly out the living room window at the periwinkle blue sky, which had a smattering of white clouds.

Enough over-embellishment. My thoughts, as they were, were mostly depressing with the occasional moment of epiphany to make them worthwhile. During this time I feel like I drift in an in-between world; the world in-between all other “living” worlds (the worlds other people are involved in). My world is a place of suspension, of stagnation and introspection.  Mostly I am crippled by my own uncontrollable anxiety that seems to rise and fall within me like waves breaking upon a once dry shore.

While I am living within this suspension world, there’s little I can do to better myself or other people. Even introspection and philosophizing after a time grows stale. The achievement beast within myself roars unsated, starving for what I can no longer provide. I wonder whether it would be better if I let the beast die off, slowly and painfully, so it could steer the rudder of my life no more.

Sometimes I wonder if this is a test. Perhaps this fall was meant to happen, to teach me everything I need to know that I haven’t yet learned about what it means to be alive. Thoughts like this can drive you mad, looping and looping inside your head, until you question every facet of conscious thought and moral value that makes you you.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just stop thinking.

Chill.

Lie on the couch.

Watch a few movies.

Eat chocolate chip icecream.

Catch some zzz’s.

But no, that isn’t me. I really want to live, the way I lived before. Or maybe not exactly the way I lived before. I feel that life wasn’t sustainable, and in the end ironically enough it lead me here. To the exact antithesis of what that life was driving towards.

So. I need new direction. New thoughts. New outlook. Perhaps I do not want to escape this suspension world to re-enter my old “living” one. Perhaps it is time to step sideways, and enter a new universe. Perhaps it is time to open my mind fully to the immense possibility the alternative has to offer me.  Perhaps it is time to take the plunge, and re-emerge newly born into the unknown.

What will I take with me? CAN I take anything with me?

Will I leave everything behind…

Kindergarten - a memory.

I am currently writing and cataloging memories of my childhood for potentially creating an autobiography, and also for my own enjoyment. This is one of the first I documented.

~

I don’t remember my first day of kindergarten. In fact, my earliest memory of kindergarten spans back to the second or third day, I believe. Back then I didn’t know I was different, but I found out pretty quickly.

The thing I remember most of all was the light. The trapezium, hexagonal, pentagonal shafts of sunlight falling between the rich fermenting green of the vast brooding trees above me.

As a child, my tiny footsteps would have gone almost unnoticed in that living, majestic place. I barely remember the shades and textures of the dirt beneath my feet due to the overwhelmingly lush textures of greenery and sunlight above me. It was some time before my vision blurred and refocussed and I saw the other children playing in two clearly divisive groups, boys and girls, on opposite ends of the playground.

The girls played with alien-like long limbed barbie dolls, dipping them in and out of a shallow, water-filled clam shell. Something about the pale limbs of the dolls and the breaking and flowing of the water appealed to me immensely, so I gathered up my courage and approached the other girls.

They didn’t seem to be facing me, or paying any attention to me at all. I stood for quite a while, expectantly, but they went on with their chatter and their game as though I didn’t exist. I had a vague feeling of unease and wrongness – but I spoke up anyway.

“Can I play?”

“No.”

With that, they went back to their game. So abruptly and decisively dismissed, I wasn’t sure what to do. I dithered at the fringes of their group, and tried again.

“Can I play?”

“No. Go away.”

Again, it was like I didn’t exist. They spoke and held their dolls and I was so clearly outside their circle, their vision, and their consciousness it was like there was an indestructible glass wall between us.

I thought I had better ‘go away’ like they instructed me to, so away I went. The kindergarten playground was designed as a large square with a central oval circled by a meandering concrete footpath. The corners of the square were grassed and ringed with trees, and the oval had a small climbing gym with a tanbark base. With the boys in one corner of the yard, and the girls in the other, I wandered away from the edge of the yard towards the deserted playground in the centre. There I lost myself in the world of the swing, the metal bars, the levels and stairs and slide. Safe but alone. In between two worlds where I was not wanted.

Masks

So I donned the mask. A whirl of colours, sounds, people, noise. The noise blasting into my eardrums, deafening. I talked until I was talked out, then I retreated into the toilets and locked myself in a cubicle. I sat there, safely enclosed within four walls, and stared at the time on my iphone as the minutes slowly ticked past. One minute, two minutes, three. How long could I get away with waiting here until my absence was noticed? When I deemed I had waited for as long as I dared, I reluctantly left the cubicle and re-emerged into the melee.

I felt people’s eyes on my face and back as I walked as nonchalantly as I could back into the gossiping crowd. Too long. I had waited too long and people had noticed. But nobody commented. I assume social niceties forbid making remarks about extended restroom breaks.

The mask was firmly in place (for those uninitiated, it’s most commonly referred to as a ‘social mask’), and I was putting on a great show, but inside things were rapidly deteriorating.  As I talked animatedly at the dinner table, turning my head rapidly from person to person and keeping my expression lively, smiling, and bright, I felt my visual surroundings beginning to blur a little as the edges of sound overlapped like tiny waves lapping gently at an inlet shore.

The conversations were moving faster now, and I could no longer keep track of what was being said. The individual words and their meaning were lost amid the roar of noise and music surrounding me. I kept the appropriate pattern of expressions in place (my most successful social mask – an elaborate construction of years of social lessons learned the hard way and careful observation) but I retreated from the fray and took up the role of interested listener.

The next part is confused. I remember talking to my parents and them telling me to go outside for a break.  I remember the sudden release of inner constraints. I remember sitting on a couch in the foyer staring blankly at the wall opposite while a group of ladies with a baby in a pram kept glancing curiously across at me. The rest is irrelevant.

Later that night, I was back – with a vengeance. I hadn’t intended to dance; keeping it calm and lingering on the border being my game plan, but events and my own outgoing social mask conspired against me and soon I was up on the dance floor rocking it with the best of them, doing things I didn’t think were possible for me to be doing with the knowledge I held inside of me.

Incompatibility. What was I drawing on now, when there were no reserves left? I didn’t want to know, but at the same time I knew that I had done this many times in the past, and perhaps today I was finally paying a price stacked too high against me. A precarious tower of cards finally crumbling and crashing to the ground.

While I was dancing I was blazing on the outside, but inside I felt nothing, like the numbness of an anesthetised wound. Like in the high point of a fever, where your cheeks are burning and your eyes are overbright.

I did my part, I played my role. But I paid for it the next day, and I’m still paying the insurmountable debt of three years of parties and social events, three years of intense social masking, three years of the sort of raging popularity and social highs I craved so desperately as an alienated child, three years of a life that could not be sustained. The price? My life as I knew it. The scales are equalled and balance is restored to a universe I never belonged in anyway.

Flames

With a paintbrush I used primaries and a brilliant orange to recreate the fires in my mind.

~

Each rain drop is a blazing light.

The night is a fire,

Flames leaping all about me.

I am caught up,

Tossed about,

Explained,

Expanded.

On the outside I am entirety.

On the inside I am burnt out, hollow,

Emotions warring vicariously through me.

A world unknown to the world,

An artist’s paradise.

15/04/11 Sickness.

What is this place?

Where am I?

Normally I write into the vast technological void of my computer writing files. My words flow in, are registered, sorted, and mostly never see the light of day. They remain unread. But if I do not share something I feel I may explode. Existential angst, perhaps? I am sinking into this strange void. A vacant space within myself that is quickly replicating outside of myself. I wish I could say I was afraid of this void, but I seem to be embracing it with little more than calm indifference. While the outside world rushes on with art, friendship, study, YouTube triviality, insomnia related complaints, I am frozen in this twilight zone.

There is nothing more to say. There is nothing within me that can be expressed. I do little in a day before the need for sleep overcomes me. I am thoroughly disinterested in any form of conversation or learning. I want nothing, but I cannot embrace nothingness with a calm or dignity that would become me.

At this time I have reoccurring thoughts of my grandma, in the final stages of her illness with secondary breast cancer. I remember how, even upon her deathbed, she never uttered a word of complaint. She embraced her sickness with positivity and good will. She lived out her last days bringing only joy to others. She died with a smile.

I feel she is a good role model to me. But I am struggling to find a reason. To see only the good in badness, to feel only joy in sadness, will this ultimately mean something? Or is denying even your own pain a final outcome of nothingness?

I am here. But for how long, I do not know.

28/06/10 If I could see through you.

If I could see through you, like a pane of glass, I wonder what I would see. Would I see the inner workings of your body, blood pumped from your heart and through your veins, lungs contracting, expanding? Could I see the colours of how you feel about me? Can emotion ever be seen, or known?

You are mysterious to me. I just don’t understand you. Sometimes I feel like we could have a lifelong intimacy, yet you are closed off in ways inexplicable to me. The way you touch me makes me feel loved, in a way foreign and new to me. Your touch feels real. But when we speak our words fall into an invisible chasm, and I don’t know this is deliberate on your part, or you are straining and it is deliberate on my part, or whether we are both straining in opposite directions. Right now, I believe you have closed yourself off, and with good reason.

I have made many mistakes, and I continue to make them despite my past knowledge. I don’t know if these mistakes occur for good reason, due to unseen feelings, or whether they are simply mistakes and accumulated will lead to the biggest mistake of my life. Are we meant for each other?

24/04/09 Death flows.

Death flows in every alley,

In every artifice,

Gentle flowing waters,

Of broken glass.