I’m too small
For these feelings and thoughts
I need to be a giant
To keep it all contained
Inside
writing
Feeding the Jays
Awaiting your arrival
Every day
Prepared and ready
For when you fly my way
A banquet awaiting you
My moustachioed
Squawking
Jay.
Silence 2
Not all silence is absence
But something trying to fulfil itself
Without success
Exhaled in sighs
Emptying trinkets in the shape of humans
Full of recycled baggage
Trying to return to our innocence
Facing the dilemma of our darker sides
Silence
The arrival…
Of footfalls…
The birds singing…
Wilting flowers
In the funeral home
That breath …
Sighed…
That lingering goodnight kiss
Remembered.
Footsteps…
R
e
c
e
d
i
n
g…
Each silence has it’s own sound
Who you tryin’ to kid.
Who you tryin’ to kid anyway
You’re just a man, on the fray
Falling at the seams
Collecting the shards of all your broken dreams
Sharp enough to cut your wrists
You’ve got desperation in your eyes
It’s in your reflection
Who you despise
You want to be someone else
Who you are, makes you unwell
You’re dying but you figure
Everyone else is dying too
So what does it matter
If you linger
Isn’t that what everyone else is doing anyway?
Heavy hearts
Trying to go with the flow
In ways in which
Heavy hearts seldom float
Silent suffering.
Watching a bird take off
A reminder life carries on
And the radio plays
As if there isn’t silence beneath
Meditation diaries: I can’t compute…
I have feelings and thoughts that I can’t compute.
An error code is flashing behind my eyes with a symbol next to it. The symbol is a triangle with an exclamation mark in it.
It’s not just a writer’s block error code, it’s a code of full system failure to compute feelings and thoughts into words, even to speak them.
There is a lack of ideas at play but at the same time too much in the head at once.
I’m aware of things that for sure feel doom and gloom yet I have no… pathway to use from there to use the information for any purpose. Whether that be, write it out and spread a message, scream it, cry it… I don’t fucking know.
I consider going down and talking to people I see often, but I find once I get towards my door to leave I realise I have nothing I can think of to say.
I mean it’s not that I’m devoid of anything to share, it’s just that I’m devoid of anything that feels worth sharing.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing. A learning curve of realising not all is worth saying.
A silence that could be peaceful if i’d just let myself be lulled by it?
It’s not that I spoke so much previously that this silence is ‘new’ but that even the little bits I did used to speak don’t at present, seem all that worth it.
I kind of like it. But I don’t trust it at the same time.
Because mixed with that there is a sense of my depression being here, pushing against me like the gravity that it is.
I can’t tell if it’s a peaceful pact I’ve found within myself where I no longer feel the need to share things not worthy of sharing or if it’s the depression telling me those things aren’t worth it.
I know the depression never really goes away for me. But I have noticed those times when my depression wants to truly haunt me, but even then vaguely, I’ll find I’ll go to bed at the same time as usual but still find myself waking up late, and when I do wake up, extremely reluctant to get out of that bed.
It’s not that I get out of bed without reluctance even on my better days, but it’s a worse, more determined, grumpy reluctance.
A menacing, sinister unwillingness to shake the covers off and greet a new day.
It takes a lot more of something feeling urgent to get me up. Like needing to pee so bad I might explode and on top of that hearing the budgie that owns me cheeping and cheeping because she’s noticed she’s been in the dark for longer than a usual night so, “Get up goddamn it! Get up!”
Which reminds me that in previous years before I was owned by a Budgie these days would be spent all day in bed.
Being owned by a Budgie and needing to care for her leaves me with an urgency that means I must get up, even if it’s a few hours later than when I’m doing better.
I had a topic in mind I wanted to write about but as said previously I have no words. I’m surprised I’ve squeezed all this out.
Chapter 12: Dragonfish
Dust motes glide in the split streams of light as people raise their arms over their heads in a colourful array of supposed dance moves. The music blasts and you can feel the bass vibrating through your bones.
I don’t know if their smiles are real, I project onto them the fakeness of my own smile.
I find myself walking through the crowds of people aimlessly chasing for those moments with Jasmine. Women are brushing against me and I’m trying to act like it’s the best night of my life, looking around me at all these faces flashing different colours in the lights, and I’m thinking, ‘are you listening to the lyrics?’
“Please tell me why, oh tell me why do we build castles in the sky…”
“Do you ever question your life?” Why yes, yes I do I question it all the time.
I’m drowning and you’re all living in a submarine separate from me. I can’t breathe.
“I think it’s time to talk with you…..Where is the love?”
Can’t you hear the desperation in their voice? I want to shake these people. They call it trance music, and it seems appropriate because they’re set in a trance dancing, moving their body like hypnotised robots.
“Give me a reason, must be a reason to hold on to what we’ve got,”
I think I’ve seen Jasmine amongst a crowd of colourful dancing people.
What is the reason? Why are we holding on?
I’m spiralling. Going deeper and deeper into the depths of the ocean, I’m dying and the woman I thought was Jasmine was a bearded man with long hair.
The music is too bright to lights to loud. Existential voices sing over beats that propose promise of a good time. My mind can’t get over the contradiction.
Greenlight, arms raised, purple, pose, red, pout those lips and move that butt. Do the robot. “I don’t wanna say I’m sorry, because I know there’s nothing wrong,” But there is! Everything is wrong!
“Hold me in your arms, cause I need you so.”
I rush out of the club and throw up in a side street. I can still hear the thump of every beat inside the building, feel it shaking my bones.
“Don’t be afraid, there’s no need to worry…”
I go to a nearby carpark and climb till I reach the top floor. The music is blasting from across the road, the neon lights shining on the night.
I stand on the edge. I hear the beginnings of a song called ‘Children’ from across the road. I know they’re dancing in there like it doesn’t sound sad. It must be me and my perception. No. The world is lost and I’m drowning in an abyss. I stand on the edge. The beat the music has gotten heavier. Like my heart.
That lingering tone behind the beat, behind the melody it reeks of sadness. Or am I just too sad to hear the happiness?
I’m dizzy, I’m tired. I lean forward and open my arms to the wind.
Close my eyes.
This is it.
Blue lights. Heavy heart.
Are those blue lights part of the club?
Sirens reach out like a hand over the music.
My hairs a mess and my palms are wet with sweat.
I feel like I’ve had an electrocution to the head.
“You don’t want to do this, son.” A male voice says behind me.
The music coming from the club speaks for me. But he doesn’t hear it’s sadness, he hears it as people having a good night.
3 months out of hospital:
I submerge my face under the water and I look up at the ceiling. I hold my breath. I hear her footsteps drawing near; I lift my head out with a gasp.
Jasmine peers around the door, “The film will be starting in 10 minutes!” She tells me before closing the door behind her and sauntering off back to the lounge.
I’m trying to learn to be a dragonfish, learning how to be my own source of light.
The End
Chapter 11: Dragonfish
We walk along the beach like a couple in a rom-com, the backs of our shoes hooked onto our fingers. The sea froths at our feet and the rollercoaster from the amusement park behind us laughs its maniacal laugh as screams of its victims penetrate the wind.
“I don’t think I love you.”
Jasmine steps further into the sea so that the rim of her skirt skims the water, she looks over her shoulder at me but turns away quickly.
The hush of the sea seems to divide us further apart with only the laughing track of the rollercoaster behind. I look over my shoulder to the pier behind me where the lone figure stands watching, waiting with smoke billowing out of his mouth. ”
So,” Her words finally crack through the laughing track, the menacing tone of it seeming to stifle the breeze, “You sure know how to make things awkward,” she laughs trying to make light of the moment.
“It’s true.” I agree.
I wade through the water till I’m next to her, “Love is never enough.”
We walk even further into the sea till it’s up to our knees. The waves lapping around us. It’s hard to tell in the darkness, but I think she’s frowning
“But you just said you don’t love me.”
I look out at ahead of me at the vastness of the sea, “And I’m saying it doesn’t matter because love is never enough anyway.”
I turn to read her shadowed expression again but she’s disappeared. I look to my left and she’s not there either. My light bulb head flashing erratically, “Jasmine?” The rollercoaster laughs at my plight distantly. As a shrill scream calls out from the ride I feel a sudden weight against me and my head goes under the water, “Is this what you want?” Jasmine asks through gritted teeth, her voice sounding far off and away, “Well” She pushes my head down harder. Submerged under the water, salt water getting in my mouth on automation a panic sets in me, I try to push myself up against the resistance. She pulls my head and I spit and cough, “What…” Is all I manage to get out before she’s plunged my head back down, “You want to die?”
I gurgle under the water. All these years of feeling like I’m drowning and I almost laugh as the water takes my breath away. She lifts my head out again, pulls my head toward her and before I can cough and splutter her lips are on my mine further suffocating me. “Of course you don’t love me,” She whispers as she pulls her lips away, “You’d rather die than love someone else.”
I cough and splutter up my lungs violently.
“If I didn’t love you,” the rollercoaster laughs at this exact point and it seems appropriate, “I probably wouldn’t hate you so much.” Her voice catches in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” I splutter.
“I know you need help,” Tears break her voice, “You’re too far gone for me.”
I close my eyes and feel the water against my body, “I’m sorry,” I repeat more clearly as she wades through the water and back to shore.
I watch my trainers float away on the water ahead of me before heading back to the pier. My clothes drenched and my lungs still burning. Couples walking home after an evening out walk hand in hand, turning their heads to look at me the drenched shoeless man walking along the pavements as I head towards gates of the theme park a moody man looking me up and down with a sigh, “Really?” he shakes his head again and tuts as he rips tickets off his booklet and takes my money. My face is flapping in the wind, the clouds above begin to spit as the clown laughs at my decline, my stomach lurching at the pull of gravity my mouth gaping open from the automatic bodily horror and excitement. My heart is racing. The laughter is followed by the whooshing sound and click-clack of the rollercoasters momentum. The laugh starts up again but more maniacally as it twists and spirals and I’m upside down. It probably looks comical, just me on my own hanging upside down suspended, the moon shining down on the world as if nothing is wrong. My heart is pounding not because I’m alive but because I’m dying. I look down at all the dots walking in all directions, humans that look like ants. Apart from it all, watching, trying to be like you but always seeming to fall short somewhere.
Concerts, parties, clubs, I watch you and I can’t connect to it because I’m feeling everything and nothing all at once. A balloon about to burst.
Noticing everything, but noticing everything is as good as noticing nothing.
”I do love you, Jasmine!” I whisper to the air around me as the ride pulls to a stop.
“One more time,” I tell the tickets guy, he shakes his head and tuts which I take to be a signal for no, so it’s with a jolt when I realise he’s let the ride start again.
