She didn’t quite know what it was. She poked and prodded at the feeling, turned it first one way and then the other. A network of lines criss-crossing her forehead as she explored this latest visitor.
On an ordinary day she would hurry a feeling like this along the many dark corridors of her psyche and into one of the numerous waiting rooms without even bothering with an introduction and shut the door with a discreet click, nursing hopes that she’d forget they existed as she worked on perfecting the smile she decorates her face with for the sake of the rest of the world.
After all, the rest of the world has the things that bug the rest of the world to deal with anyway, so why add to the cart?
She knows that sometimes some of the feelings revolt and turn against her, having waited interminably for the attention she never paid to them. They come at her with a vengeance, without warning at the most inappropriate times, like in the middle of a board meeting, when someone makes a carless remark about her attitude to work, or how she carries on as if the world ought to be revolving around her. They’ve been known to attack her at those times, viciously, hacking away at her insides, kicking down the doors and tearing away at the threads of her optimism and confidence. Leaving her drowning in her own tears and suffocating on the gall of her misery.
They hold her down then, dragging her by her thoughts into that most dreaded place; the prison in her head, screeching and sneering, hurling shards of memory at her naked form, creating a deafening cacophony as she lies cowering on the floor.
She hates that place. She avoids it like the plague. She knows the worst place to be locked up in, is in the prison of your own body, your own experiences.
She knows she can’t afford to be there for long even if she gets captured. So she has built escape routes and set markers to guide her back up and out when she manages to escape.
Her most morbid fear is a live thing, and she sees it in her brother’s moth eaten stare. The things in his head had bitten huge, random chunks out of his reality, leaving see through, jagged holes in his awareness because he didn’t know how to tame them and keep them in check.
So she knows she cannot let the things in her head do the same to her.
She fears the blood they share, and doesn’t want to share more so she fights. Even when the fight is nothing but a small squeak, she fights to hold on to the sliver of light, guards sanity with a fierce jealousy and keeps reality in a constant line of sight.
But this is not an ordinary day. Today she wants to understand this feeling that has just arrived. She pokes and prods, asking it questions and hoping for definitive answers
She wonders why she felt at some point like she had missed this soft dark cloudiness that’s courting her shoulders. Almost like she was rebelling against the feverish buzz she had worked so hard to wrap herself in. This feeling felt familiar, almost comforting.
She wondered why she felt tempted to strip herself naked from the scabs shed covered herself with and plunge naked and raw into its depths. What was this? Her old, melancholy self demanding recognition? Her new warrior self deluding her into thinking she had become strong enough to explore shadows?
There’s a certain peace there, a certain familiarity in the blackness that courts her. She decides for a moment to wear it for a day. But even as she made the decision, a snide sarcasm pulls her right cheek up in derision, pushing almost all the way up into her ears.
“Yeah right; Wear it for one day will you; just be sure you’re ready to be gone for much longer than five years this time, you know your captors have not been sleeping on the job. No one knows you better than your own demons…”
