pieces

Have you ever experienced the complete inability to do anything? As if to breathe, walk, eat, even sleep, were a long, daunting to-do list that you wanted nothing more than to crumple up and throw out the window. When the blank stares, counting the infinite number of white dots on the painted dry-wall and concrete make your eyes start to water. When you can no longer distinguish whether or not your eyes are actually watering or if the tears have transformed from a steady stream to the last drops of a leaky faucet that cannot be shut off. When to move your mouth, your lips, your eyelids, creates the internal sensation of moving mountains. Where every word sounds like gibberish, both those that leave your mouth and those that hit your ears. When sitting in a crowd of people makes you feel infinitely lonelier than when you are alone. When time moves in slow motion.

This is the space that I live in now. It is cold and empty and lifeless. I breathe, not of my own volition, but as a mechanism to keep me moving from one tortured moment to the next. In the hope that maybe, just maybe, that next moment will be less painful.

My life has not been easy. This is a euphemism for: My life has been really fucked up. I have delivered myself to Death’s doorstep countless times, as if it were the gates of heaven, and He is never home when I come calling. There is quite a bit of irony in this. Through the myriad disguises and tactics I have used to get myself a date with Him, He always rejects me. But for the countless people that I have loved, those who brought themselves there and those who were brought there by the external taxi ride of life, He is always home, welcoming them into his home with a stiff martini and a gift basket. It is as if He is mocking me. I have probably cursed Him more than god.

I don’t know where to begin. Every time I try to piece the puzzle together in my head, it ends up backwards and sideways, or missing a crucial piece, or like one of those puzzles that are all black and nearly impossible to complete unless you are Stephen Hawking or something. I want to know how I got here. I want to know where ‘here’ is.

I suppose I should begin at the beginning. At least that is what I have heard countless times, nestled backwards on a plushy couch in countless rooms, deliberately facing away from the countless strange and foreign faces that claim to know better than I how to solve my problems.

The beginning.

The beginning.

History has never been my favorite subject.