Call it: Life

I

I see through my mother’s eyes. I am satisfied, she is satisfied.

Her mother smiles down at her and takes the plate away.

My mother’s heart skips a beat, I feel her rush to move. She wants to help. They both are in no position. They both could use another but have each other. There’s a sad smile on each of their faces. I feel full and saddened and excited and loved.

It gets dark again.

It’s wet and grey, and there something stale in the cemetery air. There are thunderous sounds in far off distances; train tracks and traffic flows close by in the city stream: as steady as the rain that seemed to fall all day. And we feel an infinite sorrow, hollow. But there is a light that takes my hand, and I don’t feel so alone now.

My grandmother smiles warmly at me and will continue too.

My mother is too distracted to know it, but it is what keeps her sound. There are too many people around for her to recognize it yet. But at the top of the hill, I want to come out. I want to take my grandmother with me. Everyone is here because she was dead, but she took my hand. As my mother and father rushed down the cemetery hill to the hospital, and I reached out to my grandmother.

It was not our time, but it never went dark again. We glowed together and kept watch of my mother and her daughter.

---

The car is running. My mother looks at my father, and he is anxious for her to leave; she is keen for him to stay. We watch him drive away, a red blur, and echoed engine roar, up the hilled potholed road, further and further, away from us.

The overcast skies continue to be weighed down. Then, my mother turns to walk up the ever daunting walkway. But my grandmother and I are with her. Even the faded burgundy bricks appear grey now, lifeless. The door seems unwelcoming: a shell, an illusion, a stranger’s hovel. My grandmother is with us but no longer within: seemingly taking the warmth from the bricks themselves.

My mother prepares for the emptiness, the lack of her mother’s welcome. For a moment, my mother pauses and wonders if she should knock. Although the keys lie squarely in her hands, it is her responsibility now, her home, her concrete shell, a time capsule: meant to never be opened, to never be found. But there my mother stood, uncorked and about to read the most explicit message.

  She opens the door.

Struck by the sight of her mother’s ransacked home. The paintings and photos stripped from the walls, the furniture tossed and disarrayed, missing and gone. She is left alone to clean and mourn. My mother grabs her stomach, rubs, where my hand pushes against her sadness.

I am still with her, and her mother is always with us.

II

In my dreamlands, I am fully grown. It feels better. It feels right. But then I wake up, and I am small again. I grow quick, though.

My crib is easy to climb. I like it. My muscles are strong, its strange but I still don’t like it. My grandmother tells me it is okay. I need to learn. She leaves me one day. It was her time to move on.

I get smart. I climb out, with my blanky, and I sleep outside my parent’s door. I scare them in the night. But the voices scare me more, and I am comfortable on the floor. I have always slept on the floor in the other worlds. I sleep with groups, we must, we must. But now I sleep in a cage, in a cell, and I don’t know how to feel safe. I’m too far away to protect or be protected. And right now, I am so small. I must adapt.

It will get more comfortable; I’ve just never had to grow.

I have always just been.

III

The darkness in the den was comforting, but the voices were getting loud again. They're teaching me how to curse, bad words in different languages, and they keep urging me, yelling at me to return. To repeat after them. To grieve for them, to listen to them, to follow them. I still sleep on the couch or on the floor, my mom gets scared when she almost steps on me. So I don’t sleep in front of the door anymore.

And I’m getting friendlier with the voices.

If I talk back and tell them no, they get angry…but not in a real way but in a starved way. When they all talk at once: it turns into a ramble hum, like the vent sounds that come out when they start back on again. I miss the cold times; it doesn’t work so well with heat. But I like the coolness that comes with the heat. I don’t like the warmth that comes with the cold. But the unfriendly times muffles the noises, and they come together, and I can drift to sleep…

But that’s when they get me.

That’s when I’m trapped.

IV

The voices don’t go away, but I don’t mind hearing. Now they travel with me, walk at my sides. They trapped me in my mind when I was alone.

My parents haven’t been together for a long time. I am alone in more ways now. I know them separately and have to protect them individually. They both are having trouble shielding me. I will be strong for my parents because they have been vital to me.

I just need to grow.

But they are all grown and seem more than lost. The doctors don’t help my mommy, and my dad doesn’t either, and their families don’t support them. But my dad helps me. And mommy says that helps her. But when I’m with her, it doesn’t help us.

They don’t really listen to me, or they just don’t always want to hear. I know sometimes I don’t listen to either, so I guess I can’t be mad. We say different things that can sound the same. But they are more significant than me. The bass in their voices and the extent of their breath is wiser than mine. I have to let it be. I can see and understand for myself: there is no place for me to intervene. Everyone finds their way.

Everything will get better; I will get better…eventually.

The voices tell me otherwise, and my eyes and ears have now found the proof; that what I always told them had to be lies: was true.

I don’t know who I am supposed to listen to…

V

These humans are strange and overly emotional.

Those things are slowly leaving me. I don’t want emotions. I use them when I need them. They make me weak and are hard to control. I have to be reliable. Then they will listen to me. I have to be closed and let my intentions drip, or they will overflow.

And I don’t want to be drowned anymore.

They will take what I say seriously. I need help to help. But I don’t think my words came out, right. There’s every emotion behind it, but there is none from them, and when there is no emotion behind it, they all seem to be offended.

When I whisper, I yell, and when I scream, I murmur.

I will just have to show them until I can learn to speak understandably. My actions appear louder…but only if they see them. And now, they have become blind too.

Age is strange. I no longer want to grow old.

VI

I would become discouraged and afraid, surrounded, and alone. When a voice would appear in true form, and I would follow them into their doorways. They would show me a world that could be my new home. But it is always a hoax. I become a leader, and the voices tell me how to rule, and I become more like them, and I get killed. I get hurt. I get locked up and locked up, and all the time runs by, except when I am back home.

Time goes nowhere, and I know that they lied. They tricked me. And I wanted to be fooled.

They say I can escape. I can go someplace else, but I wake up at one of my parent’s home, or my grandparents, or a family friend, or a hospital, and I can’t go anywhere but present.

In my mind and soul, the voices have me locked in a maze with too many doorways. And every time I think and blink and sleep, and breath: I am there, and I cannot find my way out. And there are terrifying times where I want to give up. I don’t want to move anymore. I don’t want to fight, I don’t care to be; all I want to do is fall asleep. All I want to do is stop.

That is when they kill me.

I am killed when I can feel everything when the weights become too much to bear. There is nothing to do, other than relent. Let go. There is only one way to die, but infinite ways to go about it. I felt them all, and I still have yet to dull. The worst by far: being ripped apart by tethered atoms, blocked in their signals of companionship, except for the alerted cries of their individual deaths, akin to the repeated moment of burning alive, before the nerves detach and die off, that moment heard, when the screams curdle and turn. The literal piercing screeches that appear: after the fear and implore, and just before the moment: your voice is a habit, and your lungs ravaged.

I was the atom and the tether. I could hear and feel the individual stab and turn: of incalculable repetitive instances of burn: a black hole death, ad infinitum. Where there is no time to stop it.

Reformed: I am not what I was.

VII

    They get me when I’m alone. And I am always alone.

I like being alone…I got used to it. But now I have to go to school, and the children make me tired. I love the teachers—the ones who listen. I sit after school by myself a lot. I have friends, but I like the ones who talk through the walls and visit me in my sleep more. They’ve always been my friends.

I take medicines now.

And I can’t fight them anymore. I got out of the mazes, the doorway universes, but parts of me died in those worlds, and pieces of me will always remain. Before, the doctors prescribed me the pills that stopped my fighting and tied me up. I found drugs and other things that turned the voices off or made them more delightful. As if they were listening to me now too.

I am dead inside, and they can understand me, exact.

But I cannot understand myself.

VIII

I was made mean and hateful. I was given grudges, and I held tight.

I didn’t like my life. It wasn’t life or death: it just was. And it was more challenging than all the rest. And the universe isn’t supposed to be this hard. But I made it rock solid and cast it with lead, before locking it within osmium bars, to be dropped into the oceanic ether. I wanted to throw in my heart. Orchestrated like harp strings set to snap at once.

Death wouldn’t stay with me, no matter how much I begged.

The pills and doctors made me blank and muted. Fragile and joyless. Empty and bored, then I found better drugs that turned the lights on. Made the colors pop. Healed my frayed connections and turned the voices to whispers while a grandeur of holy sonatas sang. And I remembered what my grandmother would whisper to me, I should not be afraid.

  But I am infinitely afraid.

Because I don’t know where I am.

IX

Being understanding doesn’t help me to understand or be understood. I am more confused than ever. I get so tired, there is nothing left of me. I scour backward to the past worlds, collecting pieces. I am building something new. I do not know what yet. If it is me, or something else.

All the parts don’t fit as they should. They were once a part of me, but they don’t look as they should. I don’t recognize who I am.

Or what I am, but it suits me for now.

X

There is a stranger in the mirror, and she looks like death. Her eyes don’t resemble mine. They are too shallow now; there is no depth. The surface is broken, and there is no light left.

I look at her, and she looks back. We don’t like each other. We are not getting along. I didn’t put my pieces right, and now my image is obscured and absurd.

One should kill the other, but we cannot decide, my reflection and I. Who is the one that is supposed to die?

The only familiarity that can be seen in our eyes: is the fact that neither should survive. There is an ego that is bruised to the point of corrosion. Fateful green hues have spread across our faces and have infected everything that is us.

We are all sick.

It is decided: I am going to kill us.

XI

Red pulsing fringes, an overwhelming consumption of black, centered darkness, is sucking all through: dismantling everything to the core, scattering fragments into infinite whirlwinds.

Pulsating out, growing and growing, while shrinking and collapsing within. The air goes out; it goes out and out, and out…but I can still breathe.

Threads overlap threads, in an atomic weaving.

The center curves into nothingness, and the edges morph into oblivion.

It is a massive whole.

An interwoven blanket, I have been taken back home.

I can see all.

The closer I peer into a pattern, the fuller the patchwork becomes, while the universal blanket stays intact.

I have never been this warm.

I have never felt this worn.

I do not know why once I could see: it felt apparent to leave.

To dive and fly and be wrapped up instead of hovering overhead. 

My atoms rearranged.

I am enveloped in the folds.

I am human once again, but I never left home.

XII

           I am grown now. At the same age, I have always been in the dreamlands, but I continue to grow beyond. It feels right. Familiar. Although now, I am small. Compact and trimmed down to bareness. I have never been this old, and I feel more like a child than before.

I have never been this cold and exposed, but there is a warmth within that never let's go.   

I stand in the present, with whispers behind me. The darkness takes its own focus to recall, now having to search for the shapes in the shapelessness. So I look forward, with the memories held. I know there is something behind me because I have already been there.

I look forward—the dark fringes, blended by the direct light - and it is clear where I am supposed to aim. Ahead.  

It is clear where I am: here.

It is clear what I am: alive.

It is clear who I am.

It is clear. It is clear.