Midnight Paradox

I am once again staring listlessly at walls. I want to detonate, because maybe then, I could make more space for the black mass excavating my sanity. I’m a sham. I’m a fucking joke. You’d think after so many years, I’d have figured out a better way to deal with myself. 

Jordan, can you hear me wailing in my dreams? Are you watching me? I know you’ve only just departed the world of the living, but will you take me home soon? I can’t keep up much longer. 

It’s the same old shit, just a different time of the year. The patterns I used to cut into my skin replay like a broken record in my head. I can’t help but imagine the morbid comfort the familiar sting of the knife would bring me. I would be shattered, cut open on the floor, but the act would give me an eerie, guilt-ridden illusion of catharsis. For weeks later, it was a sickening reminder of the psychosis driving me into a corner. Raised in Braille that I cannot read. I want to break the surface of my skin. But I can’t let anyone know. I can’t let any more people worry.

If I could reach into my chest and tear out my heart, right now, I would. If I could break my chest cavity open, oh my god, how I wish I fucking could. But I’m not strong enough, not today. So I bite my tongue and continue to simmer. 

Just write whatever you’re thinking about. Put to words whatever is going on in your mind. 

This endless stream of consciousness is exhausting. White noise governs the wastelands of my skull. I stab at random thoughts, attempting to isolate them, trying to listen and acknowledge them but the rambling is incessant. It’s equivalent to picking at the same scab, over and over and over again, over and over and over again until oh fuck, it’s bleeding again and you desperately try to staunch the flow and then it’s itching again and shit, it’s back. 

Yesterday, the world turned upside down. One minute I was watching the TV and the next, my vision cut out. All I saw were static, fuzzy gray lines perforating my view. A blinding flash of light, and I’ve returned to reality but have I? I feel like a museum exhibit, and as I meander through the day in the sluggish opacity of air, I sense the eyes of someone unknown boring holes into me. Every time I turn my gaze, I am gambling that the crazed eyes of some maniac will be staring back at me. What I know is no longer truth. 

In my head, I am screaming all the time. At the top of my lungs into some void at the back of my mind. Perhaps this is what allows me to keep quiet when my face is not able to contort into visible emotions. It is hard at times to control my visage, to react to what people say to me when I can barely hear them over the white noise. I had a thought to follow that, but I’ve lost it already. 

Everything will be okay so long as all the ducks are lined up in row. I just need to have a handle on the few things left in my control. But my candle is burning out and soon, the midnight oil will be gone altogether. 

The way I see it, the books are all stacked neatly but the pile is growing. One wrong move and everything will topple over. That is how close I am to losing my fucking mind. 

I want to take a sledgehammer and destroy the walls of my house. I desperately want to sleep without waking up and lying awake while the world is silent around me. I want to punch a hole in the fucking door, because I fucking can and it doesn’t fucking matter what people think. I want to  get blackout beyond measure like I used to, but I am miserable, sober or not. I am blindingly and exceedingly angry at everything and everyone and I CURSE THE FUCKING UNIVERSE FOR THE WAY I FUCKING AM. 

But you can’t, you can’t, you can’t. You’re better now than you used to be. You’re healing. Don’t let this backtrack you. But how? How can I how can I HOW CAN I? WHO KEEPS MOVING THE FUCKING FINISH LINE?

I am a sinful Buddhist. I am in so much pain that I cannot even profess to lead a virtuous life. It is enough agony having to pretend that I am holding it together when I am not. 

And you want to know the most fucked up part? I’m not even here. Not in this plane, not in this dimension, not in this sphere. Everything pulses in my vision, but it is not a vibrant, vivid, intoxicating kind of pulse. It is a lifeless pulse that fades in and out, casting my shadows longer and longer until they engulf my perception. 

The greatest paradox is the absolute yearning for meaning that guides me through each day, searching for some inexplicable wholeness of experience to staunch the bereftness of my soul. 

And every midnight, I reset like clockwork, plunged into some fleeting euphoria or eternal anguish. The indelible craving for some curious incident to happen that will eventually pull me out of my fantasies of death. Such that when I finally depart, it is without regrets. 

Only I can untangle myself from this wicked trap I’ve woven for myself. The kind of trap where fulfillment is just out of grasp. It’s a shame that I know I’m better than this. I just don’t always want to be. 

I can’t give into my symptoms, as much as I want to. Then people would really give up on me. And I would really make myself disappear…again. 

I am once again staring listlessly at my walls. I am locked in my wall, eyes roaming for a hallucination to take over. My mind is racing and I am depleted. The anxiety in me makes me quiver, goading me to do something because that’s what I always end up doing anyway. The sadness renders me motionless, but the paralysis allows me to scan my surroundings and ground myself. This is all I have in me today. 

These words I’ve written look so ugly on paper, but it’s better than just staring listlessly at the walls. 

There is a Banksy poster on my wall of a girl releasing a red heart-shaped balloon. The painting is in black and white, except for the heart balloon. I find myself wishing in my rawest, most helpless moments that when I tear my heart out of my chest, it will float away, pulsing, vibrant, full of life like that balloon. 

But the closest I will ever get to tearing my heart out is bleeding my ink on paper. Then, for the briefest flicker, the most ephemeral lightness alleviates the deadweight of a vessel I call my being. Just for a minute. 

And like clockwork, the vessel resets at midnight. Who will I be tomorrow? Hard to say, but I’ll let you know if I find out.