nine lives

Today I cut myself again. 

When I went outside to smoke, I sat in my rusty armchair and tried to listen to my thoughts over the music ringing through the earphones. A lone fly kept hovering over me. Every time I caught the thing idly perched on my arm, I’d try to shoo him off emphatically, but to no avail. Why was this fly so obsessed with me? Couldn’t it tell I just wanted to be left alone?

It’s a funny thing that as you get older, you try so hard to forget so many things; yet somehow, in a somewhat amusing, fucked up way, it always comes flooding back at the most inopportune moment. So many snippets of my past have come flooding back at the worst possible times lately. 

Tomorrow is 8 months since my friend Verona died. When I think about her death, by car accident, I think about how often I thought of death as a child. I was often a silent child at home, and I used to count the minutes I didn’t speak. I’d stop counting after a few hours, but during those times, I tried to listen to my thoughts, who often spoke of death. It was hard to listen though, because all I saw was a vat of darkness, stretching past the infinite limitations of black holes, string theory, and multiverses. I found that death was truly a harrowing valley, and it literally sucked the life out of you. As I got older, the visions would change. Specifically, I mean how I ended up in the vat of darkness would change. Death by car accident, piercing a knife through the heart, jumping off the roof, but the pool of black vacuum past the cave in my mind always stayed the same. 

When I was a child, this deeply frightened me, experiencing this vision of death that deep down, I knew I was summoning myself. As I got older, this vision became more comforting. It became the place I mourned, the place I could be my truest, saddest self. 

Sometimes I miss this all-consuming sadness. The more you hurt, the more you try to forget. They don’t tell you that as you heal, you forget too. You forget how you got through the sleepless, endless nights. You forget where you left the mask. You forget how to navigate your way through the valley of darkness. 

I learned that communication was a good way to prevent the slippery downhill slope. I learned that depression gets easier, paranoia becomes manageable, and mania just comes and goes. That psychosis is but a temporary shelter and eventually, you have to find a way back home. A long time ago, I didn’t know where that home was. It was not in Fremont, not in my family, not in my temple of a body. A temple I desecrated because no place felt safe, much less sacred and holy. 

So, with a lot of help along the way, I built a sanctuary to reside in. I consecrated a hall, in the physical manifestation of a 1980s condo, where the lone child hiding in the back of my mind could really live. I allowed others into this space, some who made me feel safe, and others I could stand to lose. But even then, I finally had a sanctuary. A sanctuary with pristine white walls, a clean slate to cradle me rather than imprison me. 

Within this sanctuary, I slowly nursed my mind back to health. Surrounded by mirrors that I once loathed, I can revel in the light pouring into this simple, often messy, temple I now call my home. 

In this home, I have two cats with moon eyes and starlight fur. I hope that sometime in their nine lives, they will find me again, like the way I found them. I know what it feels like to be left behind, and the lone child in the back of my mind weeps when I think about it for too long. 

I am very scared of being left behind. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because I spent much of my life growing up alone. I spent a lot of time peeking out of windows and praying. I used to spend all my waking nights praying to God, but I’m not sure who heard. The lone child at the back of my mind begged a lot on her knees. For forgiveness, for someone to hear her wailing, for a call, a vision, anything, anything, anything to make this reality disappear. 

That’s the place I go to when I cut myself. 

I see crazy eyes and I hear the blood pounding inside me. But no cut could hurt more than the eggshells I was and still am walking on. But even this you forget when you’re healing, until you’re pitched headfirst into the vat of darkness again. 

I wish there was someone or something that would just know sometimes. I wish communicating was easier when my mind is drawing a blank and my heart is breaking but I don’t know why. I wish I knew the point of what I was writing about before I started, but here we are now.

Not much has changed since pre- and post- sanctuary. 

It is still difficult to beg for emotional availability when you’re not quite sure what you’re feeling inside yourself. 

I still sit on the floor and stare at walls when I shut down. I still want to cut myself when my mind is drawing a blank. I still lock myself somewhere and cry on my own when I’m overwhelmed. I still feel like I’m being abandoned when I can’t find my way back to the lone child in my mind. I still lose control and have panic attacks when I do so. 

I’ve just gotten a lot better at finding my way home faster. I’ve also gotten better at self-soothing even though I wish I didn’t have to. 

August is never an easy month. It is the month of ghosts, of retrograde, of superstition, of loss. I often lose my sense of self in August, and I dissociate a lot when I think about encountering psychosis again. I can’t help but feel alone in August because reality is fake and I feel like I’m stuck again. 

Stuck against the four walls, claustrophobia smirking and closing in on me. I am holding so much in, waiting for my next therapy session, which will be my last for a long while. 

I feel like I’m going to be wandering lost and alone again. Everyday I alternate between feeling ready and not, and just as it was hard to accept every new therapist that fell into my lap over the years, it will be hard to navigate the darkness without someone to break down the journey with me after. 

When I went without therapy for a while, it was a choice so I wouldn’t have to keep starting over and reinventing myself to someone who didn’t know anything about me. Finding the lone child at the back of my mind takes a journey of many moons, and it’s a difficult story to keep to oneself. 

Today I cut myself because I felt so far away. It would’ve taken lightyears to bring me back, and the vat of darkness was choking me. Attempts at self soothing have sapped all my energy, and I was there, trapped again. The only way to set free a caged bird is to cut her loose.

But instead of staring into the eyes of the lone girl at the back of my mind, I found myself face to face with moon eyes and starlight fur. Two little shadows who love me in their own bizarre way. 

And all I can do again is pray, this time to the keeper of our souls, that every year, when the gateway of the living and dead opens, the lives that once touched us find their way back to us again, whether they come in the form of nine lives, of new therapists, of love or self-destruction. 

And for the many souls who have touched my life and the lives of those I love, there’s so much we forget and remember as we heal and grieve. But you live with us in so many ways, whether we see it now or not. So perhaps it is in such times of loss that we remember to start looking for the lone child at the back of our minds. 

It’s time to find the way back to our sanctuary again.