In Between

I haven’t written in a few days which is odd because I usually like to put everything I think out there as it helps to clear my head. This past week or so I have been struggling a great deal with a lot of different things including my own mortality. Doing what’s right for me is never easy. Especially when I have never really cared before, we were sent you with one sole mission in life and that was to die, so I am left asking the question, why can’t we as a society accept our own deaths or the deaths of our loved ones? Other cultures who we consider more primitive deal with death in such a profound, loving and spiritually appeasing way. Somewhere along the line we lost that and became this society that fears that in which we cannot control. I often wonder what the catalyst to this extreme and rather sudden change regarding death was. It came to fruition somehow and instead of being embraced it became feared. 

Selfishness perhaps?

As I lay here awake at quarter after five in the morning my mind is flooded with thoughts from the most rational to the most irrational I have ever had. Bouncing from one thing to the next like a fox on a trampoline. I have images pouring in faster than I can process them and they are all becoming jumbled into one big mass.

I see myself fighting, being restrained in a hospital and then I see myself fighting and being restrained by the men who took my soul. I can see the ceiling tiles that I would stare up at while being raped. I can feel the hands on my flesh being gentle just before they assault me. I can hear the word “sorry” when the torture is done for the night, but then again, was it ever really done?

I close my eyes and as I drift from the present to the past I can feel the restraints on my wrists and ankles. The cold steel followed by the click of a lock causing my stomach to twinge from that sense of permanency that the lock seemed to give off. Like the lock possessed an energy all its’ own, strange how an inanimate object can hold such power and be associated with so much pain. It wasn’t the locks fault.

I miss a lot of things. I miss feeling the kicks of a baby growing inside of me. I miss the will to get up in the morning and live, instead of having a life that I have learned to hate. I have come so far yet really gone nowhere. Today, fear is my chain. It is what holds me still. It is what prevents me from moving forward and learning to love to live again. Fear may only be four short letters but they may be the most powerful in the English language. 

I remember growing up and how close me and my cousins were. We saw each other every weekend, we played hide and seek in the most insane locations. We got stuck in quick sand and had to yank each other out. We would slide ourselves down embankments of sand hundreds of feet into areas that had collapsed from rainfall and we had fun. We called our giant hole “the junior grand canyon”. It gave us years of enjoyment as it progressively grew and it was our secret because we were told not to go there because it was dangerous. Now us girls rarely talk. Not even at Christmas or Thanksgiving. We have all become separate entities. People who grew up as my sisters are now unrecognizable to me in both image and in who they have become. I definitely struggle with respecting them, or anyone who I once considered to be family. “The good die young”.

Now I live my life in hiding with few neighbours and no one who comes into my home. I have my dogs and my cat and my bird as my friends and I have become this recluse who doesn’t recognize their own life, or in this case, lack of life. Fear has trapped me here somewhere between life and death. Maybe this state of mind is in fact the purgatory that the church once spoke of. I look around this hell hole and each pile of stuff, each book that hasn’t been put away, each box; they all represent the chaos that I feel deep within. I can’t bring myself to organize and put things away because inside I am so deeply out of order. You can look behind the piles of stuff and see that I was once quite organized. Books on the shelves are in order of size. The knickknacks are specifically placed. The reality is you can see the exact moment in which I decided to give up on life, the exact moment in which I allowed my life to stop, the moment in which the pain became unbearable and that I quit loving because if you love you lose and I can’t afford to lose anyone else, not now, not again. This chaos doesn’t just represent the mess I am in; it represents my loss of control over my life, my emotions, and my fear. It shows that I am being dictated by a power far beyond my own control and most of all it shows that I really don’t care. In that moment something inside of me gave up and I quit. I don’t know how to turn that desire back on, likely because I don’t care enough to want to. 

Part of me has all these crazy plans and the other part, the dominating part, keeps me locked up inside. Is this a result of having post-traumatic stress or is this something bigger than that? I am most definitely lost and have far more questions that I do answers, yet when I am given the opportunity to ask my questions I draw a blank, like a printer without ink. I open my mouth and nothing comes out. I tend to be shy, fearful, and most of all ashamed of how I feel and fear.

It’s quarter to six now and I am still rambling on. It helps that I can type fast I suppose or much of this would be missed and lost into the air forever. I have described myself as feeling dead inside but really I know that’s not the case. I feel far too much pain and sorrow filling the holes within my being to be dead. If being dead is feels like this then maybe that’s where my fear in the after-life stems from.

I tried to kill this pain because of someone making it even worse. I wonder how it feels to be the person to push someone over the edge on purpose. Does it make you feel big, powerful? I would feel horrible if it was me that had caused that break and pushed someone over the edge I often teeter on. Unfortunately, we live in a society where most people are more concerned about themselves then they are others and they will gladly hurt you just so they can have a moment of feeling as though they’ve won. The internet seems to have made it even easier to purposely hurt another person because we disregard one another as human. We create a persona that allows us to be anyone or anything. We aren’t all the person we claim to be online and honesty is lost and real people who you only know by a screen name end up hurt, or dead.

I suppose I will post this and then head to bed. I am not really sleepy yet but everyone keeps insisting I rest. Not sure if they want me to rest because I physically need it or if they are worried about the mental fractures I have been dealing with over the last few months. With the new chaos and fear I am rather fragile. The word “rest” reminds me of the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Sometimes I swear laying here and looking up at the knots in the pine and looking for faces or patterns in those knots will drive me over the edge like the woman depicted in that story. Psychosis is psychosis in my book, regardless of the cause.

I have come to realize that maybe it’s not death that scares me but living forever in this realm and then the next that gives me goose-bumps and instills a fear deep within my soul. I believe that to die would be a great adventure. I guess I will find out one day, as far as I can tell no one has ever conquered it and lived on forever. If they have, they have yet to admit it. Then again, I wouldn’t admit it either. I suppose that would be a one way ticket to the nearest padded cell.