I need to be left alone. You whisper quietly to yourself, to your mind hoping beyond hope that your mind will take it seriously and just stop. Just for a minute. Not for long. Just for a minute. Long enough to organize the compartments. Long enough to reach into the jungle of half strings that threatens to choke you at every corner and turn. Long enough to hush the screams that always deafen you on the inside, the horror screams that never seem to go away or even dissipate with all the smiles that you show the world. The chaos in my mind frightening and engulfing me, drowning every fiber of sense that I could clutch at, leaving me empty and hollow. With thoughts of distractions to destructions in my head. Seeing the light one moment and when it finally feels like I almost have it, the light shifting to the shadows that purposely work to make me blind. Blind of anything but my existence, if it could be could that.
Someone whispers to me, what are you doing? I would look around expecting some foul breathed creature looking at me intently with disgust in its eyes and hate crowding its face but all I see is nothing. Am breathing, I would think to myself. What for? It would persist. And I would be lost. Holding my breath hoping for a revelation, feeling a little dizzy and lightheaded but no answer. What for indeed? The massive weight of the world threaten to cripple me, how do I take a step when am overwhelmed by all this weight, all these thoughts that threaten my every step, that suffocate me at every turn. How and when did it all pile here I ask. I look ahead and struggle, each day at a time girl, I silently encourage myself. Sometimes it’s too much and that don’t even work, so I whisper, an hour a day girl and when that insistently fail, I focus on the seconds. One second at a time. I don’t know what I’ll focus on if ever that gets to be too much. When that second will seem to kill my vibe. Vibe? What vibe? You call this movement of chest, this dragging of air in and out of your pathetic system vibe? I cringe.
This can’t be it. I say that as often and as convincingly as I can. Maybe eventually some part of me will listen, and maybe that part will grow and strengthen my whole system, but in the meantime, what do I do? What do I tell myself? What will keep me grounded when the whole world is shifting around me and I feel stuck, my feet sinking into the quicksand I didn’t know I had stepped on? Where will my heart lead my feet? I laugh. The cold slab of meat inside me that supposedly pumps and keeps me upright is my salvation? My compass? Sighs. I got lost even before I started it would seem. Were it possible, I would call it a day. Disintegrate all my parts and bid each goodbye. See you legs, may your feet forever follow the light. Oh brain, this is the end for us, may your activities be factual now that the mind has left you, and oh, don’t forget to keep in touch. Yes mouth, this is really it! Maybe if I had used you better, we wouldn’t be in this hole of despair that we find ourselves in. Stomach, it was always a pleasure but maybe life would be easier without you, I certainly hope so. Eyes, for all we have seen and all I expected to see, am tempted not to part with you…but you are troublesome in your fixture. Sometimes I believed if I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t need it, or want it, so take care and maybe you should take the ears with you for company. Oh, you have the other eye for company, well, good riddance to you then. Ears, you have heard so much and listened so little, why is that? The mind is to blame? Look at you passing off blame so effortlessly. May the sounds of the world be kinder!
Only then would I find peace I guess…probably! I don’t know! So I breathe and hide behind my glasses, push back the tears that brim over, square my shoulders and shift the weight around them. We will only fail the day we refuse to struggle,
The Grey Shade of Life 