cogito ergo doleo

Where does the magic go when it leaves?

I get these glimpses, a stir, almost like a tunnel-shake in my peripheral vision and I can almost feel.

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to have no walls, no borders or boundaries. It’s a completely alien concept to me.

I’ve had walls since before I could form coherent sentences.

Some lives are more broken than others, but only on the inside, only where nobody will see the me I see when I see me. All of you get a facsimile, I learned to hide before I learned anything else, it’s my Dexter Morgan moments that you’ll never get to see.

There’s this image in my mind, a chalkboard and the words “hope is a four letter word” scrawled with haste, as if written during an escape attempt.

That’s your whisper in the dark, the half-glimpsed form, the cold wind tickling the back of your neck – like a kiss of death.

Faceless and formless, just a vast darkness that claims anything it touches.

Somewhere in there is a boy silently screaming, soundless tears burning clean furrows down dirty cheeks. Fists balled, white-knuckled with impotent rage.

Nobody hears the quiet ones, the ones who scream inside, who create a version of acceptable to show the world; mine feels two-dimensional.

As if I could step out from behind it and you’d all see it was really made out of cardboard the whole time.

Real life doesn’t work like that. Not when your subconscious mind built a fortress before you even knew what one was and then crammed you into it to keep those terrifyingly real things that happen to people from ever being able to touch you again…it leaves a sort of trail, a psychic slash in the mind, like a neon-lit river in the darkness, one that fills brimful of all the normal emotions that should be flowing in and are instead channeled out and away: sometimes you get splashed but you’re dry before you fully realize it.

That’s what it feels like today.

❤