30/01/2023
I have come to realise that looking outside is a doomed exercise and a waste of time. Everything is evil except for what is inside the walls of the perfectly balanced ecosystem that is my house. Even then, even when I’m hidden in bed, it is still all too much; my nerves are on my skin’s exterior, plucked like harp strings, reverberating. There is no hiding. I am constantly exposed and every pinch leaves me visibly tensed into a fleshy corkscrew, furling and unfurling with a spine that is increasingly splintered and losing its shape, possessing no desire to re-form, just wasting away. This world is loathsome and unsafe. The hideous kraken that is humanity devours every scrap of beauty left in this rancid highway overpass of a civilisation we call home. I want to fly away but I’m a collection of stumps, so I sit and wither instead. One day we will all be dead.
It’s 2024, and last night I went back in time. Lithe as a shadow, I transported myself through hundreds of lived days until I had returned to January 2023. It was 2:00am on a Monday and I sat, phantom-like, on my bedroom’s chest of drawers and looked down at my past self, sleeping in bed beside me. She was sweating and shivering a little, not unexpected, but a result of the antidepressants that had just been raised. I couldn’t stay long; she would wake up soon; she only slept a couple of hours at a time.
I remember being her. I didn’t want to be awake anymore; I wanted to sleep through my life until the line between slumber and death blurred, so I wouldn’t recognise the moment my heart stopped, for there would only be one smooth highway from dreams to a dazzling new world, and only afterwards would I breathe a sigh of relief upon realising the sadness was behind me, a mere prologue to eternity. In that place lie mansions, and there are no dragons to slay, or prices to pay. I will not wish for time to disappear, for the leaves to fall more quickly or the clock hands to fly, echoing my own spiral with the tick-tock of relentless despair ringing in my ears, but rather, in that place, time will mean a perpetual paradise in a never-ending light. When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun…
As I sat on the chest of drawers contemplating this it became hard to keep my silence; I wanted to tell her encouraging things about making it to 2024, like how she’ll get her health under control, how she won’t feel so angry and how her daschund will learn to ride in the car without vomiting. However, I didn’t want to wake her up and I knew that even if I told her these things she probably wouldn’t believe me, or even care. Instead I continued to sit there in silence, and a few minutes after 3:00am I saw her begin to stir, drowsily. Dawn was approaching, and I knew I had to return to my present and her future, despite all that had been left unsaid. I decided to leave a part of myself behind, a spark of creativity and courage, a proverbial lightbulb for her to discover when she woke up, and with that I spirited away, back to my present day.
The lightbulb I left behind was an idea, that the time had come to write her book about everything that had happened, so she could take her dreams, and skills, and beliefs, and transform them into art, after which all the darkness would be released into the ether as poetry, shining soliloquies colouring the atmosphere. She could take painful memories and cut them into the shapes of moons and stars and decorate the sky with them, scrapbooking the past into a constellation of survival, to remind her in those early witching hours that time was always passing, there were light years between her and all that harm, and isn’t our galaxy beautiful? Instead of blood she could bleed in ink, and let every heartbeat splatter blank, waiting pages with black and blue honesty, not pump toxins throughout her body leaving bitterness in the deep. I just hope she listens to me.
It’s a new day and as usual I don’t want to get out of bed. I hear the coffee machine whirring downstairs and think vaguely about getting up for a cup, but the morning listlessness keeps me anchored within the sheets. I drift in and out of consciousness, but eventually work beckons, and it’s this work that will pay for my writing career (imagine if writing actually made decent money!) I rub my eyes… maybe now is the time to write that book… you know, the one that’s been living in my head for the last five years. I’ll reach in and scoop it out like peanut butter; it won’t be the crumbling scabs of a festering wound but a smooth brushstroke spread across canvas juxtaposing light and shadow to create a complete picture. I’ll frame it and give it a name. I might even be proud of it. I might even be proud of myself. I sit up in bed and breathe deeply; I am going to try.