The Ashes of an Engine
Some mornings the room is a small, traitorous ocean and the bed is a hull that will not budge. The pills used to be a tide that lifted everything, brightened my voice, smoothed the edges until ambition felt like a garment I had sewn myself. Now they are costume jewelry. I swallow the same names, press the same keys, speak the same easy hello, and the world answers like a radio with no station. My limbs remember choreography but the music is gone. Getting up is a negotiation I always lose. Cold sweat maps my spine in the middle of the night and my hands feel like they belong to someone waiting at the bus stop for a bus that will never come.
I was taught to be a headline, the polished version kept in pockets for strangers. Ambitious, driven, busy bodied, outgoing, sweet, kind. People pass me checks like compliments, deposit me into stories they tell about themselves. I learned to be who the dope wanted me to be because being me felt like a photograph that never developed. Without that chemical light everything blurs into fog. The fog isn’t gentle. It robs me of verbs. It hands me nouns that don’t fit. I stand in rooms & watch the sound of my laugh fall like confetti that no one bothers to sweep up.
The thoughts come like tv static, loud enough to make me flinch, small and intimate like someone tapping on the glass between us. Suicidal ideas are paper boats I dont dare set on the water. I fold em up, tuck them into the pages of old notebooks, and tell myself I am too afraid to act on that shit. Fear sits like a patient dog at my feet. it wont be shooed away. Brain fog wraps itself around the corners of sentences until language becomes a foreign country. I taste old coffee and metal and regret. My reflection is a stitched patchwork of personas I rented and never returned, a grin held on a line by a puppet I no longer know how to operate.
..did i really ever ?
Tonight the bathroom light was the color of a brush burn and the mirror offered me the kind of honesty you only get after midnight. I found a list in my hoodie pocket of things to do, things I once thought would make me me, and they looked like dominoes, each one waiting for the push. I imagined two versions of myself standing at opposite doors, arguing in a language I used to be fluent in. Im so exhausted. Im tired of being efficient at my own obliteration. I push my feet into slippers and stand, and for the first time in a very long time I move toward the door not because someone scheduled me to, but because something in the hallway smells like rain and possibility. I put my hand on the doorknob and the house inhales, and then I hear a sound behind me that I do not recognize. It might be a footstep. It might be laughter. It might be the sound of every promise I ever made to myself collapsing into an animal that knows how to open locks. I turn, and the darkness says my name, but not in a voice I remember.