There are moments when we feel loss, in a way that ravages the outskirts of even the boundaries that we have set for ourselves. In the next breath, we can swim through love, as though it were a kind of sickness, that tears through the lungs and leaves you choking on its depths.
I have always been unashamed of how I feel. How I express each unhinged surge of happy or sad or angry. How I lunge through each turn on my own private ride through each emotion, not unlike some badly designed maze of bumper to bumper craziness. Slamming and jerking into each thought and at the end of each intense stomach wrenching twist, I am so tired. I ache from hanging on.
For someone that feels so much about everything and everyone on a loop of neon, like night lights that leave a trail of what was, but what isn’t really, it’s all surprisingly unmemorable. There are moments burned into me that will never leave. Moments where the light bulbs touched my skin and my flesh blistered. But the rest is just as stale as someone else’s photo album. You can see that there is joy and there is laughter and there is love and there is colour – but none of it belongs to you.
My home is littered with souvenirs of my attachment to the idea that my world is as fragile as the plastic helmets mothers put on their children’s heads before they send them off on their bicycles hurtling down some hill with gleeful anticipation. As fragile as the helmet. As unpredictable as the brakes. As silly as the flowers printed on the handle bars.
My paranoia is clear. Baseball bat. Machete. Axe. Sickle. Hammer. Or maybe it’s not paranoia. Maybe its hope. Oh, and the screwdriver, right beside the little figurine of ‘The Punisher’.
A very small handful of people in my lifetime have instinctively known that although I am capable of the bite after the bark – I was taught to fight. I was taught to hate myself with such ferocity, that hating other people became natural.
But when I loved… man, did I give it everything. Everything, until that little voice deep down inside, the softest, quietest one that still somehow has the power to bring down legions of my strongest – tells me, ‘you are not good enough.’
That’s all it takes, and the tough, gnarly fighter in me steps back into the shadows and with head bowed – climbs back onto that bone breaking ride that is my mind, and waits for the slam. Waits for the click release of the rusted wheels of my bumper car, and waits for that sound – that is so familiar. The one that I can’t ignore because it downs out everything else, and to ignore it would mean waging war with demons that know me better than I know myself.
To love and be loved. To trust. To endure the silence of peace.
Unfathomable.
Mocking Bird Down 