Eyes slipped past sleep. I have an ache in my gut. Not for anyone else but me, pointing a playful finger. It's derisive, clean and I don't like this thing, holding onto me. I don't like this place. The opinions of the others are law, and law isn't to be broken, but my thoughts and my gut don't work like that. They look down when others are looking up. They stargaze when other's avert their eyes to their shoes. Scuffling feet, darting eyes, someone told me my gaze moves like a ping-pong ball. Brings me back to those days in my childhood when I had to wear a patch over one of my spectacle lenses to correct my lazy eye. I would wear a patch, or any kind of silly accessory- a fez, a sombrero, clogs, Malvolio's yellow ribbons to the knees- anything to correct the scattering that scatters my gaze and misaligns my aspirations, intentions, points of view, too far out of the scope that's correct, too far a deviation from the standard. My heart rattles like a tin cup. My lungs are littered. When I do the things I'm meant to do, and by that I mean, what others do as if second nature, I feel bewildered. Sometimes I feel I've done a bad thing. The lights are going out, the sun sets in the east, the trees cry when the leaves fall and none of them are the beautiful bright colour that excites me in autumn. The last thing I want is the sunset lifted, the conversation extinguished, the eyes rolled behind turned backs, the eyelashes fluttering in front of my face in the pattern of some morse code I never learnt. The same code that the starlight spells out. The same one that is tapped out by cutlery at my family's dinner table. And when the digits on the clock read 4.00 and it's not the afternoon, the birds are starting to chatter, and I'm too afraid of my thoughts to stay alone with them in the dark and my pillow. A pillow is no desirable bedfellow. It brings no comfort. It just leaves prints on my cheek, still feels heavy with tears it caught, it's dented from the place I have hidden my face. Apprehension is not sudden anymore. Fight or flight is not a fight or a flight.
I have a crooked back, a crooked personality. I can't nod slowly, my head is buoyant in a sea of self-doubt, and God knows where my brains are. That worries me too because where is God in all this? Wings whistling over the skylines and the river, the weary water. Is there such a thing as understanding beyond thought? Where do these questions come from? They are just fooling with me, but violently, and when I embrace them I rattle like a train track, a can of spray paint. When will I carry my height, when will I measure up to my weight? When will I not be an embarrassment? Step one, find a way to stop quivering. The occasional and inexplicable seizures concern me, but not as much as they possibly should. I should be afraid that my neurons and synapses are revolting against me, twisted up and rearranging of their own accord. Maybe I don't think of that because, of all my component parts, my brain has been the most privileged. Given the best treatment. Hasn't it? Well, it did stop and speak to me for that stretch of horrific months. The most malevolent voices that sounded like me but omniscient, omnipotent, and mocking, echoing. The voices of my family that came from nowhere, always mocking. Wasn't that my brain rebelling too? Let's not think about the convulsions. Let's just try to stop the quivering. Then perhaps my heart will follow, put an end to its kicking. Then will my shoulders drop, will the frenetic pace of my life slow down to that of a conveyor belt, or a postman's trolley? Patience is a virtue I never learnt, not through anyone's fault but my inability to pick up certain things, like hitting a tennis ball, like holding back tears, like living without concerns I should not have had until I'd grown into the right age to be troubled by them. But it's only impatience with myself that I am talking about. With others, the standards are very different. Multiplied, not double as far as standards go. I don't listen much to myself, in part because I don't like what my mind tells me and in part because I seem to have the tendency to go against any well-directed intuitions. But I listen to others. I cannot even in this prose put into words the value I believe lies in the act of listening. Which, of course, is no act. It's what makes my world turn, really. It gives meaning. The minds of others. Perhaps that is what led me down the path of psychology in both my academic and personal life, in terms of what I study and read, and the company I keep, and the way things work outside of any learning arena.
Mind on repeat
I find a retreat
to no place that's neat
but can make it complete.