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?

XVII – The Moon

She saw her face washing away every night. Slowly. A little bit at a time. It disappeared. Pieces of luminous skin sloughing away with each passing wave. Gelatinous breezes hurrying up the process.

She didn’t know why. She didn’t know when it had begun. For as long as she remembered, this interminable murder of feeling had been inexorably whittling away at her being. At her very self.

Had she done something wrong? Hadn’t she been punished enough? Cruelly, the shifting mirror never told her any truth but this. Piece by piece, slice by slice, her form carved away a little bit at a time. Again and again.

Running. Always running. Towards something, or from someone. Moving forward or backwards in the vast confines of an eternal blackness. Feeling the mysterious pull of liquid infinity.

Until there was The Nothing.

Darkness interminable.

And then, a small ray of hope in the dwindling emptiness. Growing bigger, a small piece at a time, until again, there she was. Crying, looking around her in destructive solitude. Clawing at her inescapable faith with a glassy stare.

Mute. Unkowing. Unknown.