Post by Coquette on Nov 8, 2007 16:06:07 GMT -5
The moon hung high in the darkened sky, taunting me. I also was suspended in the air, although how, I could never say. I often wondered if I had momentarily died, if I was having one of those near-death experiences I'd seen on late-night sitcoms. I knew I had put myself in this situation; there was something wrong with me. I just didn't know what it was. I knew what I wanted it to be, but I'd learned that long ago what we have and what we want to have are two very different things.
I felt small, floating in a vast amount of space that was reason and logic from my lungs. Time was relative, it was as if it had slowed and stopped all at once, while rushing past my ears and whistling.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade. I surveyed the scene before me with the clinical observation of a doctor.
Small, trembling fingers reached out to pound weakly on a smudged white wall. Someone was screaming. I opened my mouth, preparing to tell them to shut up, that other people had more important scenes to scream about, only to find my voice already occupied. Those hands-- they weren't be my hands, no. My hands are far more graceful and talented. They don't have dirty chipped nails and disgusting little creases on the backs like some roadmap to Hell. My hands are porcelain personified, crafting, creating, clutching, carrying. My hands are handy, not like these feeble little useless establishments presented before me.
Those hands continued to strike at the wall, but with each blow their conviction wavered, and fell. I watched with confusion and disgust. I wanted to reach out and capture those hands, tugging them ruthlessly away from their wallops, but I found my fingers otherwise engaged. I hated those hands. I hated what they stood for and who they worked for. I hated everything about those hands, down to the bumpy little callous on the index finger to the right. I hated how the cuticles were meant to be pushed neatly back, but were jagged and frayed at the edges. I loathed the knuckles with their precocious little fat folds and rough scars. I abhorred the nails' need for filing and polish, to be slick and shiny and perfect was their only goal. For a moment I thought I could be a nail, resting in my glittering perfection on the tip of a greater being, working with the collective to be beautiful and important yet capable of scraping softened skin away without so much as a second glance.
The feet. Oh, god, those feet. Small, and lumpy, with fine hairs smattering stubby toes. Disgusting feet. Hobbit feet, my friends would have called them, if they had ever seen them. Dazed, I wonder where they must have travelled. Perhaps as a child they ran through fields, stepping on bees and stones and bark-- grating the off the missing length of her stumpy digits and hardening the outer core of those pedals. A person is a rose, and at the bottom lay the thorns. I hated those feet. Red polish tipped the nails as if to solidify the fact, dripped from a brush weilded by those shaking, powerless hands. I hated the patches of pink left on the skin by too much scrubbing and not enough remover.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade. I continued moving my gaze over the scene, becoming more and more invested in the patient. She was small, confused. She had checked herself into the facility as a proactive measure against mental disease. Perhaps wanting to be here was her disease.
That hair. It wouldn't be a lie to state I hated that hair. Black and bristled at the ends from too many days of changed identity. Coarse and curly in the mornings, as if it spent most of its time plugged into a light socket. Heat barely tamed it for an hour or two, as if the inner absurdity of the mind sent it into fits, bound in ties and clips and bright plastic barettes.
A piece of that hair fell into my eye. No wonder I hated that hair.
Reality slammed back into place with the force of a car hitting an aluminum pole capped with a sign that said "Watch for Vanilla Ice", a joke some adolescent had seen on the Internet and thought would be hilarious. I peered down at my hands, my feet. I would be sick with what I saw. That calloused index finger, the stubby toes, Hell's roadmap. All mine. All hated. It was me, all along.
My hands continued to clobber the poor, dirty, off-white wall. The wall was supposed to be white, but after years of hands, just like these, touching and stroking, helping me along, the wall was streaked with thousands of ivory fingerprints. A new art treatment, I suppose. Scummy-chic, I guess. My voice continued to rise in its fervent pitch, barely forming the singular sound of a scream, then, momentarily--words.
"Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?"
No answer. My mind raced as quickly as my heart palpitated inside my chest, beating against my ribcage. Suddenly, I wished to be schizophrenic if only for the company. One of the voices would have the answer, I knew they would. The hands rose to my temples, pounding, pushing, promoting the mental illness I almost longed to have. If I could put one more voice in there-- a calm, rational manifestation of madness-- and have someone to talk to, I'd find a way.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade.
The calloused fingers with their precocious little fat folds dug into my scalp. I would rip out that black, coarse, hideous hair. It would leave entrance for the voices. The voices. My friends, my company, my sanity, my rational reasoning, they'd tell me why. They'd answer my burning question and then they'd sit and mock them with me. They'd say all the right things. She was a dirty little homewrecker, someone you could run over with your car if it weren't for those pesky laws always getting in the way. He only liked her for the oral contributions she made to the workplace. The voices... they'd whisper to me, lick my inner ears with their silver tongues. The lovely voices, I wanted the voices. I wanted someone to talk to, and at the same time, someone to blame for my wicked thoughts. I had no voices. The wrinkled, chubby hands dropped to my lap.
"Such a silly little girl..." my mind snickered.
I jumped, throwing my hands to the ceiling, white where the walls could not be. Had my wish come true? A voice-- nay, mine own. Contempt brewed within me, even as my devastated cries continued. I hated that voice, my conscience. It wasn't rational, not like the voices would be. Stupid conscience. It never said the things I wanted it to say. A person's conscience is not a good friend, I thought, not like a best friend who knew the right things to say at the right time. Not like the voices I so eagerly awaited.
"Shut up, you." I murmered to the tiny character resting in the pit of my belly; it was something I envisioned being small, green, and nasty-tempered, like my great-grandfather's bulldog or my cat which I had nicknamed 'The Walrus'. "I did everything right. Nobody knows. Nobody needs to know." My voice rose as conviction and rage boiled inside of me, drying my face in a single wave of heat.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade.
I rose from my sitting place, pushing away from the off-white wall and whirling around, my eyes in a ricochet over the room, searching, searching. I found nothing, just as I had searched the inner dwellings of my mind for companionship. I shook my head, looking around the room with its stark almost-white walls, its single bed. I gazed down myself at the robin's-egg blue pajames, the fluffy slippers. I would find nothing here.
I perched my mildly rotund backside on the edge of the bed, picking lint only I could see from the matching blue sheets. The clock ticked resoundingly in my ears. Still no voices. All was as it should be.
As the sun rose over my the stark white facility, I wondered why I had entered myself here in the first place. The men in their long coats, watching me with dull eyes, they said there was nothing wrong with me. I knew there was. I could feel it, in the pit of my stomach like a craving for hot dogs or my favorite flavor of ice cream. Perhaps they couldn't find my ailment, but I knew it was there, lurking in the shadows of my subconcious and waiting to strike at any unsuspecting moment. I would be here, waiting for that moment long before it came. But I knew it would come.
They didn't need to know.
I felt small, floating in a vast amount of space that was reason and logic from my lungs. Time was relative, it was as if it had slowed and stopped all at once, while rushing past my ears and whistling.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade. I surveyed the scene before me with the clinical observation of a doctor.
Small, trembling fingers reached out to pound weakly on a smudged white wall. Someone was screaming. I opened my mouth, preparing to tell them to shut up, that other people had more important scenes to scream about, only to find my voice already occupied. Those hands-- they weren't be my hands, no. My hands are far more graceful and talented. They don't have dirty chipped nails and disgusting little creases on the backs like some roadmap to Hell. My hands are porcelain personified, crafting, creating, clutching, carrying. My hands are handy, not like these feeble little useless establishments presented before me.
Those hands continued to strike at the wall, but with each blow their conviction wavered, and fell. I watched with confusion and disgust. I wanted to reach out and capture those hands, tugging them ruthlessly away from their wallops, but I found my fingers otherwise engaged. I hated those hands. I hated what they stood for and who they worked for. I hated everything about those hands, down to the bumpy little callous on the index finger to the right. I hated how the cuticles were meant to be pushed neatly back, but were jagged and frayed at the edges. I loathed the knuckles with their precocious little fat folds and rough scars. I abhorred the nails' need for filing and polish, to be slick and shiny and perfect was their only goal. For a moment I thought I could be a nail, resting in my glittering perfection on the tip of a greater being, working with the collective to be beautiful and important yet capable of scraping softened skin away without so much as a second glance.
The feet. Oh, god, those feet. Small, and lumpy, with fine hairs smattering stubby toes. Disgusting feet. Hobbit feet, my friends would have called them, if they had ever seen them. Dazed, I wonder where they must have travelled. Perhaps as a child they ran through fields, stepping on bees and stones and bark-- grating the off the missing length of her stumpy digits and hardening the outer core of those pedals. A person is a rose, and at the bottom lay the thorns. I hated those feet. Red polish tipped the nails as if to solidify the fact, dripped from a brush weilded by those shaking, powerless hands. I hated the patches of pink left on the skin by too much scrubbing and not enough remover.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade. I continued moving my gaze over the scene, becoming more and more invested in the patient. She was small, confused. She had checked herself into the facility as a proactive measure against mental disease. Perhaps wanting to be here was her disease.
That hair. It wouldn't be a lie to state I hated that hair. Black and bristled at the ends from too many days of changed identity. Coarse and curly in the mornings, as if it spent most of its time plugged into a light socket. Heat barely tamed it for an hour or two, as if the inner absurdity of the mind sent it into fits, bound in ties and clips and bright plastic barettes.
A piece of that hair fell into my eye. No wonder I hated that hair.
Reality slammed back into place with the force of a car hitting an aluminum pole capped with a sign that said "Watch for Vanilla Ice", a joke some adolescent had seen on the Internet and thought would be hilarious. I peered down at my hands, my feet. I would be sick with what I saw. That calloused index finger, the stubby toes, Hell's roadmap. All mine. All hated. It was me, all along.
My hands continued to clobber the poor, dirty, off-white wall. The wall was supposed to be white, but after years of hands, just like these, touching and stroking, helping me along, the wall was streaked with thousands of ivory fingerprints. A new art treatment, I suppose. Scummy-chic, I guess. My voice continued to rise in its fervent pitch, barely forming the singular sound of a scream, then, momentarily--words.
"Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?"
No answer. My mind raced as quickly as my heart palpitated inside my chest, beating against my ribcage. Suddenly, I wished to be schizophrenic if only for the company. One of the voices would have the answer, I knew they would. The hands rose to my temples, pounding, pushing, promoting the mental illness I almost longed to have. If I could put one more voice in there-- a calm, rational manifestation of madness-- and have someone to talk to, I'd find a way.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade.
The calloused fingers with their precocious little fat folds dug into my scalp. I would rip out that black, coarse, hideous hair. It would leave entrance for the voices. The voices. My friends, my company, my sanity, my rational reasoning, they'd tell me why. They'd answer my burning question and then they'd sit and mock them with me. They'd say all the right things. She was a dirty little homewrecker, someone you could run over with your car if it weren't for those pesky laws always getting in the way. He only liked her for the oral contributions she made to the workplace. The voices... they'd whisper to me, lick my inner ears with their silver tongues. The lovely voices, I wanted the voices. I wanted someone to talk to, and at the same time, someone to blame for my wicked thoughts. I had no voices. The wrinkled, chubby hands dropped to my lap.
"Such a silly little girl..." my mind snickered.
I jumped, throwing my hands to the ceiling, white where the walls could not be. Had my wish come true? A voice-- nay, mine own. Contempt brewed within me, even as my devastated cries continued. I hated that voice, my conscience. It wasn't rational, not like the voices would be. Stupid conscience. It never said the things I wanted it to say. A person's conscience is not a good friend, I thought, not like a best friend who knew the right things to say at the right time. Not like the voices I so eagerly awaited.
"Shut up, you." I murmered to the tiny character resting in the pit of my belly; it was something I envisioned being small, green, and nasty-tempered, like my great-grandfather's bulldog or my cat which I had nicknamed 'The Walrus'. "I did everything right. Nobody knows. Nobody needs to know." My voice rose as conviction and rage boiled inside of me, drying my face in a single wave of heat.
The sky lightened a fraction of a shade.
I rose from my sitting place, pushing away from the off-white wall and whirling around, my eyes in a ricochet over the room, searching, searching. I found nothing, just as I had searched the inner dwellings of my mind for companionship. I shook my head, looking around the room with its stark almost-white walls, its single bed. I gazed down myself at the robin's-egg blue pajames, the fluffy slippers. I would find nothing here.
I perched my mildly rotund backside on the edge of the bed, picking lint only I could see from the matching blue sheets. The clock ticked resoundingly in my ears. Still no voices. All was as it should be.
As the sun rose over my the stark white facility, I wondered why I had entered myself here in the first place. The men in their long coats, watching me with dull eyes, they said there was nothing wrong with me. I knew there was. I could feel it, in the pit of my stomach like a craving for hot dogs or my favorite flavor of ice cream. Perhaps they couldn't find my ailment, but I knew it was there, lurking in the shadows of my subconcious and waiting to strike at any unsuspecting moment. I would be here, waiting for that moment long before it came. But I knew it would come.
They didn't need to know.
