Bursting Forth
It should be impossible to feel so heavy and so light at the same time — to be dense yet weightless. Bursting yet empty. My head is saturated with a viscous and opaque vapor, filling the volume of the space it inhabits with neither restraint nor permission. It is black like tar and as white as nothingness.
I’ve lost my Lexapro in the pile of clothing I cannot put away without the help of medicine. It has fallen, lost in an accumulation of unwashed t-shirts and into a pool of my ivory oblivion. It might live there forever. I should go find it, but I am scared the pile might swallow me whole. Perhaps it already has.
My sheets are as dirty as my floor as my dishes as my brain. My room is too small for all it contains. The clothes will burst out of the walls soon, I’m sure of it, cracking me open along the way.
I am to be reminded that this is a puzzle, not a curse — an obstacle, not a burden. But it has not felt very much like I am remembering. I’m hardly even echoing. Sometimes I wonder if I ever knew it at all. I think I must be lying.
I look at my mother and father for relief and instead find their own pile of emotional neglect, littered with bottles I know exist but cannot see. I implore you to tell me that these are not the cards I must succumb to. We have tried to build houses out of these cards, sure. We pretend that they are sturdy, just as we pretend that the insides are not bare. “Look at the house we built,” we say. Isn’t it grand? Perhaps I should learn to appreciate that I have that house at all. Perhaps I should burn it down.
My father stumbles with clumsy feet. I shuffle mine so as to not stumble, but I am told that I should pick mine up. Walk with intention! Stop ruining the bottoms of your shoes! We spent money on those, you know! I understand — I have since started buying my own shoes, and I don’t want to ruin them. Now I even buy my own bottles, too. I can see them, but pretend they don’t exist. They sit collecting dust, adding to the pile.
My room is too small. My house is too fragile.
To feel is to be alive, yet so much feeling has invaded that it has left no more room for life. My space is filled with conflict and accommodation and negotiations I do not want to make. There is not enough room. I want to be big. I want to spill. I am full in the wrong places — my body makes adipose tissue but no serotonin. It gives me an excess of gut but a paucity of stability. I find myself wondering what there is left to be at peace with. I must hate myself. Do I?
If I let myself burst, I am convinced I will explode. I will detonate. I will destroy. There will be nothing but pieces, and no one will help me pick them up. I will stand in the glory of my eruption and I will be alone. But I will not stumble.
