Solitude

When you’ve been bedridden for a long time, the sun only a memory, the fresh moving air of the big outside a far-off luxury, your state of mind inevitably changes. You start inventing small everyday rituals and tasks for yourself, not as a way to make time pass, though that’s a part of it, but as a way to keep your mind occupied and your life on a structured path. Being so cut off from everything and everyone also takes its toll. Now, I’m an introvert – I literally hate people, well most of them anyways. However this still gets to me. Ever since I’ve been in here, I started to loose time. To forget things said and done. I would think I’d told someone about a hospital appointment, when in reality I would have done nothing of the sort, and the conversation would have taken place only in my head. Similarly, I would forget physiotherapy appointments, thinking I’d changed dates.

When you loose your notion of time, something transcendental takes place. It’s like you’re in a world of your own, with its own rules of time and space. Your bedroom becomes the universe, and anything extraneous is only a passing shadow. The mirror of a dream which was real, once upon a time, long long ago.

Perceiving that one day, perhaps, all this will end and I will once again be part of the world outside is a far off glimmer. I know I am supposed to hope it will happen soon, but I cannot see it. I cannot imagine walking in the street, catching the bus, being in a roomful of people, many of them whom I’ve never ever met before. Strangers. I cannot fathom not feeling the humid warm recycled air of my house. Not being able to rest in bed whenever I feel pain, or tired, or just too depressed to even face the light coming from the balcony. 

Falling into the soft embrace of tears each time any little inconsequential thing takes place, each time sadness disturbs the placid waters of my day to day life – I am not fit for normal human company. Will I ever be again? Will I ever go back to what I was? And even if I heal physically, will I be able to interact with strangers in a foreign environment, or worse with people who think they ‘know me’? 

Do I really want to?

She of the Venomenous Name

Smear it over me, let me bathe in it
Tip my breasts with gobs of scarlet heat
My hands mold and shape cavernous monsters of hatred
My tongue licks it up in a tense explosion of lust

She gnaws at me from the inside
this invisible creature inside my head,
prodding and prying at my weakest spots
scurrying silently in the hard shiny darkness

Always, she is present
eroding away at the maggoty substance of my brain
cheering on the neverending cacophony of shadows
thwarted and twisted by the past

Still, I listen
always unsure whether she be friend or foe
although her words, like twinkling shards, hurt
they are always true after all

She is the ME that can never be forgotten
the ME that can never be forgiven
I have always known her secret name
always been afraid of earning her notice

Her gaze gleams like black oil on a mirror
Grinning teeth smirking at every inconsistency
Paranoid and succulent she awaits for a pause,
a moment, a single excuse to sing her banshee lament

I thank her sometimes, for opening my eyes,
at others I wonder if she merely ripped new ones
hungry for blood she awaits, never sleeping
my Goddess, my lover, my sister in the blood

© M.M