King’s log, entry #2
May. 2nd, 2020 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allhailthedramakingI spend four years buried alive in my bedroom. Or maybe forty. I do not recall: I live so many lives as I lay under the covers in the dark, wandering through lumiscent worlds.
I am thirteen and summer is a hateful season. I see them hurry outside, foolish kids laughing with their bicycles and cruel jokes and teenage curiosity. I am fourteen and I plan to kill myself with the easiness they plan their holydays by the sea. I am fifteen, gloom, homebound, just finding out about a chronic illness that has been stealing my body since I hit puberty, and I entertain dialogues between my echo resonating through these empty walls and my otherwise unanswered voice. I am sixteen and I wonder if it is normal to allucinate a fullfilling life, clutching to my internet friend as I bathe in the remembrances of the first – only – time I met her.
My prison comes back to reclaim me as we students, just graduated from high school, are called to choose our destiny. Theirs? Rome. His? Florence. Mine? Death. But my parents aren’t so keen to surrender me to the Grim Reaper – they’d rather wish for a more ordinary education. I’d been allucinating many things, but how to be my own reaper was the one I made a reality: first day of university I fall as a leaf in autumn, and then straight back in my bedroom – I won’t see the light of day before four months. I never expected to live past ninenteen; yet I do, but time never stops feeling like I borrowed it from Death, patiently waiting for me to come to our appointment. Late, as I always do.
Indeed, when I am released again, I do not realize until it’s too late that the world did not wait for me. Instead I turn my shoulders to the future and live into a calendar where a day lasts four seasons and 2007 is always three years ago. Ironically, despite these desperate attempts to tone down my interactions with Life, it happens and it reapes me worse than Death. In the tennis match between Death and Life I am a ball thrown from outside there to inside here and back, both players alluring with their promises of a sweet salvation from sorrow, both refusing to take me in the end.
I am incarcerated again last autumn and, had not been for fluoxetine and a hope unhoped-for flourishing in all its foolish stubbornness, the latter would have been the winner. My latest brush with Death propels me to swear I will not violate parole, I swear, I swear, I will put time to a good use.
Convict meets global pandemic.
Initially I refuse to accept it, too preoccupied with wars waged by my predators and the loss of any resolution I had tiresomely gathered. Then days pass by and it breaks me to confess it... but quarantine feels as familiar as my bedroom. Conforting, even, as a sudden normalcy I was never allowed to reclaim is bestowed upon me since we’re all bound to stay home, stay still, stay away from the ones we love. I am a horrible person, I say to my therapist on the phone. I think of my brother’s boyfriend, nursing his patients back to health, and I envision him as an old man, wondering if the lines of his smile will harmonise with the ones the mask he wears is drawing on his face. My brother reassures me. You gave your money, you gave your blood, you listen and care for people in need, he says. But no atonement is enough to wash away my unspoken sin.
The truth is I listen to my loved ones as they lament feeling as they are forced into a waiting room, their loves far away, their binge-eating rampant, their dreams of a life under the sun once it will be over, I listen and sew my lips and pour my compassion down their throats, and I hate it. I hate that I had no life to put on hold to begin with as I struggled to be functional both before and during quarantine. I hate the bijective silence surrounding my lifelong distance connection that dares not speak its name. I hate not my body, not anymore, but this brokenness, these guts and glands and bones and thoughts anchoring me underground while people walk upon the land. I hate their faith that their dreams will come true instead of tearing them apart because dreams proved impossible to reach. I hate them living with the families they started in the house they rented. I hate that their temporary is my everyday.
As I am consumed by my inner fiend who sets fire to my envies and whispers reminders of how I will never be good enough to get what they have, I look in the mirror and I hate the demon smirking in the reflection, too. Will you ever let me go, demon? Will I ever be truly free?
Yesterday my mother told me to rejoyce as quarantine is almost over and I will be free to roam again the streets of my town. No, mother, you missed my point. I was not speaking of the waiting room.
I was speaking of the cage.
I am thirteen and summer is a hateful season. I see them hurry outside, foolish kids laughing with their bicycles and cruel jokes and teenage curiosity. I am fourteen and I plan to kill myself with the easiness they plan their holydays by the sea. I am fifteen, gloom, homebound, just finding out about a chronic illness that has been stealing my body since I hit puberty, and I entertain dialogues between my echo resonating through these empty walls and my otherwise unanswered voice. I am sixteen and I wonder if it is normal to allucinate a fullfilling life, clutching to my internet friend as I bathe in the remembrances of the first – only – time I met her.
My prison comes back to reclaim me as we students, just graduated from high school, are called to choose our destiny. Theirs? Rome. His? Florence. Mine? Death. But my parents aren’t so keen to surrender me to the Grim Reaper – they’d rather wish for a more ordinary education. I’d been allucinating many things, but how to be my own reaper was the one I made a reality: first day of university I fall as a leaf in autumn, and then straight back in my bedroom – I won’t see the light of day before four months. I never expected to live past ninenteen; yet I do, but time never stops feeling like I borrowed it from Death, patiently waiting for me to come to our appointment. Late, as I always do.
Indeed, when I am released again, I do not realize until it’s too late that the world did not wait for me. Instead I turn my shoulders to the future and live into a calendar where a day lasts four seasons and 2007 is always three years ago. Ironically, despite these desperate attempts to tone down my interactions with Life, it happens and it reapes me worse than Death. In the tennis match between Death and Life I am a ball thrown from outside there to inside here and back, both players alluring with their promises of a sweet salvation from sorrow, both refusing to take me in the end.
I am incarcerated again last autumn and, had not been for fluoxetine and a hope unhoped-for flourishing in all its foolish stubbornness, the latter would have been the winner. My latest brush with Death propels me to swear I will not violate parole, I swear, I swear, I will put time to a good use.
Convict meets global pandemic.
Initially I refuse to accept it, too preoccupied with wars waged by my predators and the loss of any resolution I had tiresomely gathered. Then days pass by and it breaks me to confess it... but quarantine feels as familiar as my bedroom. Conforting, even, as a sudden normalcy I was never allowed to reclaim is bestowed upon me since we’re all bound to stay home, stay still, stay away from the ones we love. I am a horrible person, I say to my therapist on the phone. I think of my brother’s boyfriend, nursing his patients back to health, and I envision him as an old man, wondering if the lines of his smile will harmonise with the ones the mask he wears is drawing on his face. My brother reassures me. You gave your money, you gave your blood, you listen and care for people in need, he says. But no atonement is enough to wash away my unspoken sin.
The truth is I listen to my loved ones as they lament feeling as they are forced into a waiting room, their loves far away, their binge-eating rampant, their dreams of a life under the sun once it will be over, I listen and sew my lips and pour my compassion down their throats, and I hate it. I hate that I had no life to put on hold to begin with as I struggled to be functional both before and during quarantine. I hate the bijective silence surrounding my lifelong distance connection that dares not speak its name. I hate not my body, not anymore, but this brokenness, these guts and glands and bones and thoughts anchoring me underground while people walk upon the land. I hate their faith that their dreams will come true instead of tearing them apart because dreams proved impossible to reach. I hate them living with the families they started in the house they rented. I hate that their temporary is my everyday.
As I am consumed by my inner fiend who sets fire to my envies and whispers reminders of how I will never be good enough to get what they have, I look in the mirror and I hate the demon smirking in the reflection, too. Will you ever let me go, demon? Will I ever be truly free?
Yesterday my mother told me to rejoyce as quarantine is almost over and I will be free to roam again the streets of my town. No, mother, you missed my point. I was not speaking of the waiting room.
I was speaking of the cage.
