cracked plaster
erosion, bedroom ceilings, and the carillon.
I AM SO HAPPY I COULD JUMP OFF A CLIFF. (HAPPY).
Suicidality, potentially originating from:
The concept that life has reached its peak— this is the happiest the speaker will ever be, so conversely, everything is downhill from here and there is no point in continuing existence.
Joy manifesting as a violent, explosive emotion; a body unable to contain that explosion is a body that must shatter or expand to accommodate it, and expansion to that degree is physically fatal.
The speaker’s relief in the idea of freedom in death.
Ideation consistent with a hypomanic episode: an abnormally high level of energy or activity, feeling extremely happy or excited, an inflated sense of self-esteem, racing thoughts, displays of purposeless movement, impulsive behavior that can lead to poor choices, etcetera.
Delusion manifesting as excessive risk-taking, e.g. feeling so good that the speaker falsely believes they are indestructible, that they cannot die or be injured, that if they fall from a great height they will either survive upon impact or suddenly sprout wings and fly:
The speaker’s belief that they can fly, as if joy provides enough buoyancy that gravity becomes irrelevant.
Sensory memory— the speaker remembers being happy on a cliff, the speaker remembers sitting at the edge of a cliff and being good and full and deathless, the speaker remembers jumping off cliffs into lakes and oceans and rivers and the sensation of flight, plummeting from fifty feet up, hitting the water like a rock, water in the nose, murky green silence, feeling the sand at the bottom; the speaker craving the adrenaline that comes from looking at death without touching it.
The speaker’s belief that they can fly away from pain,
The speaker’s belief that they can fly away from pain,
The speaker’s belief that they can fly away from pain,
There’s two roads. One leads to pain and the other one leads to painlessness, a way to live characterized by happiness and ease of movement. Each of them involve pain, but it’s different types of pain— one is the pain of staying and one is the pain of going, but if you’re splitting hairs, it’s all pain in the end. The pain of going eventually ends up as the ‘painless’ option, but to get to that point, the pain will be worse than the pain of staying is. You can tough it out for a few years and eventually be set free or you can stay in mild pain for the rest of your life. Physical pain, psychological pain, spiritual pain, emotional pain. Take a shot every time I say pain. Jesus fucking Christ.
Note to self: there is no miracle cure for whatever is physically wrong with me. If there is, I haven’t crossed paths with it. I’m not ruling out its existence, but considering that the belief I’ll ever be able to return to “normal” is a three-year-long running joke at this point, I have to approach the issue as if it’s going to be this way forever.
Okay, then. There’s two roads. Both lead to suffering, but one is a suffering that you dictate in one way and the other is a suffering that you dictate in another way, because you always have at least some degree of choice, no matter your circumstances. The difference there is that if you fuck up, it’s your fuck up. Pros of that are the autonomy and maturity granted by having to reckon with the consequences of your actions; cons of that are the consequences of your actions. Everything in the entire world is like this. The only question that has ever existed is how much suffering can you take?
Out of spite, I remain slouched against the leg of my desk— it’s digging into my spine like it’s trying to snap me in two— for three more minutes, then let myself slide down. It’s 6:34 p.m. and my day feels either like it’s just beginning or like it’s also trying to snap me in two. I was very happy but now I’m not and the hours are stretching out in front of me like taffy. Six hours at night are three morning hours. Three morning hours are ten afternoon hours. No point in wishing for linearity; I don’t feel like being betrayed.
On the other side of my bedroom, the dog has conquered my mattress, slowly turning in a half circle and then settling herself down for another nap. I’m laying face up the floor because I want to. Because I want to.
I look up. My ceiling is nothing. It is The Nothing. Nothing is nothing like this nothing. There used to be cracks, you know? Entire spiderwebs stretched across the ceiling, as if it could barely hold itself up. Like it was falling apart. They were plastered over not long after my sibling moved out— once we no longer shared a bedroom; once I was alone— and now looking up means looking into a blank place. There are no stars to navigate by anymore. It’s just empty white plaster, and you couldn’t make me cover it up even if you paid me. I like the empty. Some empty is good for me. If there’s no empty, there’s no space for good things. This is something I tell myself very often.
The dog, laying under the same emptiness, lets out a little yip and slaps her tail against the duvet. She’s chasing squirrels in her head. She’s chasing rabbits. She’s running across a field— she’s running across an endless field— she’s running full tilt across a long-grassed, never-ending field full of rodents to hunt and kill, hurtling into a horizon that never comes. Or something to that tune, I’d imagine. Maybe she’s dreaming that my mother has come home. She’s happy either way.
I look back up at the white ceiling. It’s gray, really, because of the fading light. It doesn’t matter. It’s still mostly nothing. They don’t tell you that being able to sit there and take pain isn’t actually a gift. You have to be able to figure that one out on your own. And, frankly, I don’t think I can, and I don’t think I have, and God only knows if I ever will.
LAND GONE FOREVER; NO WAY TO BEAT BACK THE TIDE. (CLIFF).
Belief that a part of self is being surrendered or taken from the speaker:
The speaker’s own tendencies, emotionally or in physical practice, erode a solid sense of self into something more nebulous; moments of intensity, fragmented thought, a lack of understanding from external (or internal) sources, etcetera.
The speaker’s memory cannot be relied upon to create an accurate image of past events, and, in leaning on the opinions and perspectives of others, they lose their own perspective and selfhood.
External factors encroach on the speaker’s physioemotional space until the speaker feels like parts of them are being snatched out of their hands:
The speaker might keep their sense of self closer to their chest as a result, which, in return, might further erode or damage it.
The speaker willingly gives themself up to others as a means of emotional parabiosis and is unable to then detach themself from the other person, locking both the speaker and the other person in a cycle of enmeshment.
The implication of an ‘ocean’ reveals a logical fallacy in the speaker’s belief system:
Nothing can ever be truly gone— things are relocated or transformed, but can never become obsolete, and the speaker is aware of this but still says it anyway.
The speaker, in desperation, unintentionally shows signs of detachment from reality.
It is heavily implied that the now-missing ‘land’ is essential; the speaker feels like something is missing from them, and that the missing thing will never return.
Instead of the ‘land’ being taken by the ‘ocean’, the speaker may be eroding the ‘land’ by getting too close to the potentially fatal edge of a ‘cliff’ and then watching as the dirt comprising the edge crumbles into the ‘ocean’;
The speaker is attracted to things that are dangerous or considered ‘forbidden’.
The speaker was curious.
The speaker was attracted not by danger but by the potential sensory experience of being near the glow of a tall place, what smell it might have, the feeling of the air, etcetera.
The speaker blames themself for the erosion, for the way the ‘ocean’ swallows things, for the edge of the ‘cliff’ being unstable, etcetera:
The speaker is aware that they’re speaking in metaphor and, as a result of that, knows that this structure— and potentially the feeling of gone-ness— is one that they have constructed and cannot be attributed to anything but their own actions.
The speaker blames themself.
“Strange moon tonight,” says my dream-father. We’re standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down into the sea. Location, of all things, is what makes me realize that I’m not awake. I know the cliff is Californian and the sea is from the Pacific Northwest. I know a swamp is hidden in the woods behind us. I know my dream-father’s dream-house— made of ramshackle tin siding, but impossible to breach nonetheless— is hidden in the swamp. I know everything about this place and I can do nothing. Crossing over the threshold into lucidity, I try to lift my feet and walk out of the dream, but they’re firmly anchored to the ground below me.
“You need to get me out of here,” I say, but he can’t hear me over the roar of the waves and the wind moving through the trees.
“Strange moon tonight,” he says again. Faces never turn out right in my head— if I was still asleep, the empty wash of his features wouldn’t strike me as odd, but the effect while conscious is incredibly unnerving. He’s mostly made of dark lines, as if someone scribbled charcoal across a page and called it a day. No eyes. Not much of a mouth. Too much detail in the skin, strangely enough; I can see every pore he has. Everything else is a blackened blur.
I try to move my feet again. They don’t budge, but outside of the dream, I can feel the muscles in my real legs twitching from the effort. I am frightened and frustrated. There are bells— church bells? Maybe not bells at all, a music box or glockenspiel or something— playing in the background and it’s just making me more uneasy. The carillon, I realize, from A Few Dollars More (1965). Watch Chimes. It’s the song that plays while a dead woman gets raped.
“You’re supposed to help me,” I tell my father. “Why won’t you help me? I need to leave. The house is being eaten. You need to listen to me.” The dream-house, hidden in the swamp, has surely been swallowed by the massive and inescapable living shadows by now. Did I mention the shadows? They live in the trees; they surround everything. The dream-house has only one entry point and that means, in return, it also has only one exit point. I think of the dream-bridge you have to cross to reach the dream-house— a tiny cobblestone stretch over a smaller creek that, despite its size, cannot be crossed without the dream-bridge. If the shadows cut off our access point, we’ll be trapped in the rotting dream-house while the shadows eat it. We’ll die or be subjected to something worse than death.
That’s not true. It’ll just be me that dies (or worse). My dream-father will be fine. He doesn’t even notice that the dream-house is coming down on his head. He probably has the shadows in his heart and that’s why he can’t hear me.
My dream-father tilts his head. He raises his dead patchwork face to the ocean breeze. No eyes. No mouth. No nose. He’s just shadows. He’s listening to the carillon, to the waves, to the dull resonance coming from every little darkness around us. So many shadows. They live in the trees and out here, in not-[California][Pacific Northwest][insert location], there is nothing but trees. “Strange moon tonight,” he says, pointing a swirling, indistinct finger into the sky, and it is. And then I wake up.
ONE BALLOON HALF-SUNK IN A MISSHAPEN EMPTY ROOM. PIPE STICKING OUT OF THE WALL. (JUMP).
I won’t share you because I don’t want to be shared:
Keep me to yourself and I’ll keep to mine.
Don’t say it where you can be heard.
I want to be saved from darkness; I want to be safe.
Leave me alone.
Leave me alone.
I stay very quiet.
It never happened at all— it was a figment of the imagination or a trick of the light or some other sort of illusion that the mind falls prey to. This implies that the speaker is subject to these sorts of mental traps.
It happened, but the events have been exaggerated or are partially fictitious— distance, either from time or compartmentalization, have let some details be lost. Naturally, every empty space must be filled, so something untrue takes their place in the speaker’s mind.
It happened and the memory is perfect— no memory is perfect.
Returning home—
One balloon (white) half-sunk (string dragging on the ground) in a misshapen empty room (fractured moulding; small piece of concrete lying on the floor). Pipe (water coming in or water going out?) sticking out (misplaced; that’s shoddy construction work) of the wall (white) (half-sunk) (misshapen).
Returned home—
Hope is not a plan.
The speaker’s belief that they can fly away from pain—
one of my faves from you 🙇🙇🙇