What You Don’t See
I feel the need to write, because I haven’t for so long. Ebbed webs are swiping my vision, blue dots here and there, and shadows whose source I search for but then realize it’s all within my own brain. “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds”. I gaze at this Mexican proverb, framed in my living room, through it becomes a blur, and something catches in my throat. Let me read, please. I can read, in my mind, for now. I follow the keyboard, my fingers rapping away from memory. I don’t know what I want to say but I know this constant triage of dots will form something, maybe something worthwhile.
They tried to bury us, and my seed cracks open, as it has always been cracked, but instead of formation of a blossom my blossom is withering. In panic, I try to water it back to life, though it remains drooping. But I have seen hope. I have seen the skies inviting me in California, telling me everything will be alright. Millions of dazzling constellations, that I know only I can see, stars sinking that I scramble to catch and freeze in time. My shell, my pearl overlapped, becomes something so wretched that I wish I could simply peel it off like a sweater and escape. It’s like the skeleton inside me has become another entity, and it has decided to multiply whatever pain humans should experience every time the sun sets and returns, which means all the time because the sun is always burning our home. Don’t you ever think about how many humans live inside you, how many lives have imprinted you but gone away like dust swirling in the air, gone but everywhere? Someone told me I was a very, very old soul. That I had many lives before this one. Maybe that’s why I feel like I have multiple minds at once, and perhaps that’s why it’s okay that I’m slowly losing this one. I hope it comes back, I hope this is temporary. But I don’t know… I say I don’t know more. More and more, less and less.
I can’t remember. I struggle, forcing myself to splash whatever words come to mind because this eloquence, this formation of possible worlds or rose-colored and multitudes of other colors in glass form that occupy my world of a brain is something I treasure and something that makes me, me. People still tell me that I say things so well, which surprises me, because every time I say something I feel disconnected, like I’m on autopilot. What did I just say? Do I look sober, normal? Am I a good actor, still? Am I being me, truly, was everything else just a dream, just a figment of something that went away just like that? Please, please. I hope so. Apparently I’m still me. I feel like me, sometimes, and when I stand with a smile and swing my hips with knowing ferocity and my flow of thoughts… I feel pure, good, and proud. I’m me. But the teacher gazing into my blurred eyes, failing to understand anything, and telling me I don’t have to come to class anymore, that’s telling me that this isn’t something I’m just fabricating, another one of my delusions.
I’m fighting to keep the person I am. And throughout the fight I am becoming stronger because I know who this entity inside me is, this ball of fire that always remains ablaze and in a daze. The daze is like a wave, building and building and bringing me down to the ocean floor. The afternoon, wrapped away in glass. I feel like my body is elevated to the top of the mountains, or pulled to the homes of plankton, because all this pressure is making me tender. I am tender like, I don’t know what animal or word I was trying to say. I forget. I’m trying to ignore this pain and set my mind on track, but something’s fading and I only strive to sleep to a world of dreams of pure, simple nothingness. Nothingness is what I strived for sometimes, some calm in the rushing waters that occupy me every day. But nw it is what I surround myself with, for more than simple rest is overwhelming. How ridiculous is this, for me to write with such vulnerability as if I am on the verge of death? How honest. Parts of me have died and are still dying, and I will not be the same. All I can do is be something new, or try to be. The familiar tug of endness, of true sadness that calls for prescription medicine, is returning but it’s everywhere, from my toes to my joints to my headache that hasn’t gone away in weeks and even decides to become another part of me, alive, thriving, throbbing. This sadness, deemed a disorder by doctors, is so disheartening, so life-threatening on its own. Layer atop layer, burden atop burden I try to cut through like a tear-inducing onion. But you don’t see any of it. You don’t see this hurricane eating away at my insides. Maybe you do, when I let go and wear my sweats and sit silent, digging away at my meal. Or when I am revitalized and returned, and carry conversation with that so-called eloquence I’m expected to have. It’s still there, at the eye of the hurricane, and the winds can slow down. But it’s a monstrosity, the mother nature of me. I can’t control it. It is me.
A little seed came inside me and became widespread. A tick spread its seed and I got Lyme disease. How people experience life, with disease or disorder or trauma or whatever else riddles us of our innocence or wish of a healthy, painless life which I so wish I never took for granted…. Is so hidden, left unshared. For how do we talk about it? How do we understand? It’s easy to not talk about it, it’s better even. I agree. I don’t like to talk about it, either. It’s good to pretend, and keep acting, going on autopilot and living for those days where I rise and can function normally. Her lack of motivation, her distantness… how lazy. How it speaks to her character. But she so wishes she could conquer this, rise above and be back to normal and back to somebody who lives with clarity and not this fog that riddles her and tunnels a hole into comfortable darkness. Comfortable, for this pain is now a part of her. No use fighting against it, pain is a daily reminder of her life, of the breaths she takes and that things can and will be okay. A paradox, like herself and like this life she lives in. Pain everywhere and bliss. I changed into third person. Why? I don’t know. Let’s just go with it. The pain, I can stand. The weakness and pains eating away at my muscles, I can stand for. My eyes, the foreign friends and blurred sensations I greet when I look everywhere and that jokingly interrupt my conversations, they’re okay. My mind, my mind of a rabbit hole left falling down and down with the rabbit nowhere in sight, with confusion of which bottle to drink and where to go… it’s making me lost, making me mad. If only I had the hat to accompany it. Wouldn’t that be dainty? I used the wrong word. I can’t bring myself to remember that word. Words. Names. Dates. They become lost, locked in that arena we call “the very tip of our tongue”.
Please, let’s not make assumptions. Let’s understand that everyone has a swirl of things going on inside them or inside their lives that we don’t know about or fully understand. Let me struggle and rise and struggle without questioning it, or deeming it something else. I’m trying. I’m a seed. Buried and stuck, and barely afloat, but also strong and powerful, like a flower remaining upright against the wind. There’s so much you don’t see, and so much I will show you despite it all. Watch me.
