The Perennial Nightmare

I feel it today. Just as I wake up, it uncoils itself languorously and I feel my heart sink to meet it. Slashing at all elaborate plans of hope, faith and prayer. Gnawing like a hungry dog at the house of cards called confidence. Venomous, malignant, it stands there at the door, laughing, mocking. And I shiver as I watch it enter my mind and own me. ‘It’. The unnameable. A fear, a cry, snake-like, that dwells deep within and spreads its hood whenever whim strikes. Digging its talons into me, drawing blood, poisoning it. Red to blue. Beautiful but devastating. Always unexpected, always when it seemed like it had bid goodbye forever.

Do they have a name for it? ‘Fear’ is too simple, ‘depression’ too complex. I hope that intellectualizing it, pigeonholing it into a definition would loosen its grip, distance its glare. Perhaps in trying to understand it, I could dilute its presence. Shake myself free. I’m not so lucky. It grabs me by the hair, heaves me through the air. I form a dark arc as I fly, petrified, gravity-defiant.

Questions drop querulously through the head into the heart. Questions that question everything I can do or be. I cling to my pad, scribble into it. After all, I may do nothing but I can write. There’s a cackle. Cruel. Callous. All I am is a cold cipher. Disintegrating. Like the morning light that liquefies on the moss-laden walls outside. A thought is planted in my mind. Not mine, I know. But I am forced to think it. The words could dry up any moment, any day. Discard me and never walk back again, while my thinning perception calls out in desperation, sucked into the valley of nobodies. Echoless. Turning into a dark disease. A gentle Anonymous.

I walk to warm myself and pass by the mirror. It’s always been an enemy. And now it reflects a ghastly ghostly scepter, a formless smoke, rising out of a snuffed candle. Hiroshima hit. Mon amour, I’m not. My body’s a square lantern, the light gone out. My head a round bald new moon. I think of beautiful people, friends, acquaintances and I cry in despair. Who’s the fairest of us all? I’ll never be one of them. But they’ll all look at me. Point and laugh. Vanity, thy name is I. I’m revolting but too solid to disappear. A paper heart is all that I own, immensely delicate, patched and torn.

Pills. Red. Blue. Also Yellow. I swallow them and they burn down like an acetylene torch. Not losing their color, they flare inside. Red. Blue. Also Yellow. Killers all. The pulp of my insides bunches up some more. I coil, snail-like on the chair. Trying to vanish into myself, trying not to board the bus that I can never get off. A light is shone into my eyes and blinded my spirit escapes like steam. I’m ironed out, straightened again, visible like a tree. I need to disappear soon. And it’s not yet noon.

I’m afraid of the maid, the driver, the watchman. Snap and snarl and shoo them away. Then hurt at being left all alone. In the kitchen, the therapeutic kitchen says my friend, I bang some pots and pans. Water boils over. Scalds me. The tongs drop. Bruising me. There’s Medusa on my hand. Samson on my leg. The colorful tentacles whirl around like joyful blubbery breaths. The onions makes me cry. It’s top cut off, the white orphan hangs like a fingertip. And I run, I scream. But I’m crippled. I’m muzzled. Paralytic.

The book I try to read melts as my eyes lase through the paper. The black ink stains my fingers, and water coats itself like gelatine on me. I can’t wash the print off. Only cast my skin aside. For a while. The book, the beautiful book remains stillborn. Losing its limbs. Evaporating even as I stare at it. Erato, the muse, vanishing like a spectacular sprite.

I breathe, my iron lung is rusting from within. A white mist like an overexposed print erupts from my cold mouth and wraps itself around me. Nothing makes any sense. The sky is red. The stars are blue. And the night is still new. Why? Why? Why? Am I the chosen one? As absurd as sunlight in the night. Do others have inhabitants within? And do they move through this, a day when self-doubt and self-loathing burns a black hole into their hearts and leaves scratch marks on their bodies and their minds sink into legendary decay? Or will tomorrow be another day?