Midnight Swim
My mind is an architect at midnight. It likes the quiet, the darkness, the way it hears the sound of the words it says to itself out loud. It's making plans for an impenetrable fortress of endless solitude. A place to domesticate the wild errant thoughts of not good enough. They multiply like rabbits sometimes, most times. These days, often. They dip between my neurons and swing in the myelin. It's there they like to sit and hang around for a while. Like the way we used to swing in the playground after school in the early summer, when the rubber seats would burn our thighs red.
I don't know where my head is at these days. And honestly, I think I spend so much time avoiding it that I don't pay much attention to it. My sister posted this aesthetic Instagram post about hyper-productivity or whatever the hell it was and I remember it slapping me in the face. Just this quick moment of complete self-realization. A fifteen-second snapshot of what I spend my days doing - filling up time to just keep myself busy. Busy work as a distraction.
And it's true. I spend my time these days scribbling down the same three premises down in the same black Moleskine that's just tired of me coddling it's broken spine. I run my fingers along its dogeared edges again and again. Madness. I come home after work and sit in front of my computer looking at a blank document wide-eyed until my pupils forget how to dilate. All I see is stars when I remember to close my eyes. My brain is in a complete Mobius loop.
It's 12:15. It's quiet, and my brain is ready to construct. The wildness of the not good enoughs are getting ready for their nightly cruise down the avenue of my callosum, and I just might let them. I'm tired. I'm constantly tired. But those bastard not good enoughs dance until all hours of the night and there's no ceiling for me to bang a broom handle against. They just make noise. White noise, but if you get the right frequency, it might be something, and I spend all night trying to find the right frequency, the right answers to make them go away. I'm tired. I'm so tired of being tired.
I'm feeling it tonight. I'm cripplingly aware that something isn't right tonight. Call it a bad PMS mood swing, but I'm off balance. I can't describe it, I don't know if it has a name, but I know it's real because of the stones that keep trying to make their way down my throat.
I don't know where my head is anymore. My mother always told me I'd lose it if it wasn't screwed on tight. I think I loosened it. I lost it a while ago. I find myself building caves of pillows and blankets, hiding as deeply as I can, holding my breath to hold it together. Maybe if I don't move it won't get me. I live inside the walls of the fortress my mind builds, just swimming alongside the not good enoughs like I'm a fish in a massive school. I don't know where I begin and the not good enoughs end.
I made my sister mad today, and I didn't even realize it until she demanded silence. It's becoming more and more often that I find myself pushing people I love farther and farther away from me. I'm scared to be near people because I might hurt them, so I hurt them anyways to keep them safe. Preventative measures, you see? But these stones in my throat feel like a cork in the top of a champagne bottle and when I pop, I don't want your shoes to be sticky.
It's 12:40, I have music in my ears and my eyes are watery. My fingers find themselves dancing over keys for the first time in weeks and while everything looks alright at this moment, it doesn't feel right. I can't make myself laugh anymore. Sure, I say dumb things. I can make a joke, but everything just feels different now. Like, somewhere in the last two years, I stumbled into the valley of the uncanny and I can't find my way out because everything looks the same, just wrong. I think I'm tired of being funny. I think this is where my head keeps circling. Funny is my armour, but I haven't been funny in so long. I don't know if I can anymore. I write and write and sad things, mad things, inconsequential things come up and run by and snippets of pretty words string themselves together into pearl necklaces that I wear like chains across my body. They weigh me down when I wade into my head and I can't come out from under. I haven't come up from under.
But I've made myself tonight promise to try. That I'm going to be better, that I'm going to come home to pen and paper, and the awareness that I'm not always okay. That I'm more than the not good enoughs parading about the folds of gray matter. So, here goes nothing.