I've got a few characters in my mind that have developed over time, some of which are extensions of myself, others characteristically standing in dramatic opposition with every fairly well-established characteristic or trait that I have learnt from others that I possess (it's no secret that all my self-knowledge comes from other people, specifically the reflections of how or what or who I am informing me of how or what or whom that is). I did a thought experiment and tried to adapt to fit the mindset of one of these characters, and began to write.
4.37 am
We're the oldest living crusaders
in a war
we can't remember,
I can't remember-
10.58 am
my dreams last night were stranger than usual. but these days dreams are no stranger than reality and that's unusual. I found my mother sitting on the front porch. Her nightdress wet from the sprinklers and she was wearing socks but no shoes, so the soggy lawn soaked right through, turning them grey. If it was still 5 or whenever I woke up and started trying to write my dreams down I would not have realised I was awake, she'd just be another part of the dream.
I wish I could This is a nightmare and I can't It's pointless to wish you could wake up from I feel sick with guilt about
I am aware of how seem only to myself writing this,
and I'm not strong enough to see that hateful wicked part of myself that I know exists and is undeniably present, not subtle,
I just don't want to see it.
And she was drumming her fingers on the decking, picking at the paint. I wish we could whitewash ourselves, all of this, us. I need to get out of here without feeling immediately like the most terrible living creature to ever own a beating heart. She's so helpless. Her little pointed eyes turned on me, her little pointed teeth seeming to get smaller the more she refrained from speaking so she could listen to her voices. They are hers because nobody else hears them and they are also hers, she says. She says she has been split off like light refracting from a prism. Sliced into little rainbow bits and fragmented and now her soul is in ribbons, her brain slivers, her central nervous system, her senses, speech.
I need to close the conversation, she was nodding and saying when I found her, not looking at anything, I need to bring it to a close.
Your clothes, I extended my arms to pull her up, as if she was my younger sister and not my mother, I imagine what haunts her, if I'm correct and have listened as hard as I have she is hampered by
the feeling the knowledge that she's been cut up and dispersed. She's not a person anymore, and not many people. Something that once was and is now fractured,
spread too thin has no central nucleus for the rest of her feral electrons to spin around. She is spinning around everywhere and without somewhere to go or to belong then you are nothing. You have nothing, and that usually means there is nothing of you because someone always has something. I fixate on the fragments themselves. Those tiny pieces of her. I think about how they are shaped. I imagine holding them in my palms, feeling their angles and even venture as far as picturing what it would be to reassemble her like a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Like a jenga backwards, without the falling bricks. I can never fully imagine getting close to completing it because the image itself is impoverished, which to me usually means it won't be possible. Things aren't possible if they'e not yet conceived of.
Someone will, though, somewhere.
She howls in the night because she sees faces in everything, They are beyond human, she says. They are never warm or kind. The world I'm in hates me, she cries again and again, what have I done? As if someone is going to answer. Even I know that her voices don't have one. If they did would she want it?
I need to get out of here and anesthetise my conscience. Or else give myself a lobotomy. I'll be mad like her if I don't get out. I'm going to go to confession tomorrow. I would go today but I need to iron Mass dress. I have enough guilt for a handful of Christians but I guess I leave the repentance for someone else.
I wish I was I wish she could God, please help us.
