(trigger warning, crisis hotline for US, 988)
I’ve taken to writing letters to the people who I want to talk to but can’t, or shouldn’t. I want so badly to ask you, where you find meaning? I’m sure you’d question what do you mean by meaning? And of course the answer is bleak, dark, that place we’ve both been in varying degrees, the meaning to keep on living. I know our brains suffer in different ways, I know I could never possibly understand what you’ve experienced, I know my existence doesn’t mean that much to you when compared to the people who move you daily, who cheer for you and keep your name safe in the midst of your darkest hours. It’s why I choose you, because you do not choose me. It fulfills that wound for me, it is elegance disguised as self hatred and cruelty, the knife I take to my wrist, the gun shot that pierces my mind over and over again. I think, that if you can find meaning then perhaps so can I, but I know it will only be a temporary balm, a bandage on a mortal wound that no amount of time or love can heal. The effort is lost on me, unless it is in my language, and such a stranger I am to life, such an alien, that I find none speak my language with the precision necessary to keep me in contact, keep me alive in this realm. I want so badly to feel the depths of care people have for me, but it’s lost in translation despite my best efforts. In the midst of your bleakest hours, is it truly those who would lose you that make you stay? Or is it that animal nature to survive? To create? To wait in teasing hope that someone will get it? The glimmers we catch in the reflection of our master pieces, the ones that lay our souls bare for all to see and none to understand. I want to be the one who gets it, because I know what it’s like for none to—I know people will say, that we do these things to ourselves. Tell ourselves these stories, repeat the narrative into truth, neglecting what is around us, and that’s all they are, are felt fiction. But in the midst of difference, in that lonely pit, it becomes unshakable truth. Fight as we might, against the current, climb as we may against the jagged walls of our enclosures, we fall, are pulled under by the conditions that pull us right back. I see now after so long, that I am not normal. We say. “WhAt Is NoRmAl?” but there is a truth to normal that allows you to get by, that doesn’t tell you that your existence is a mistake. That the voice in our heads is not to be listened to, it can be turned down, modified, improved. I wish for that normal for myself, for you.
I’m sure you’ve found ways to make your cage more bearable, I have tried to do the same, and it’s why I beg you, I implore you, what is your meaning?
Perhaps, it will ignite the spark, the light for a different path in this labyrinth of a mind. To find the neural pathway that will take me down a reliably repeatable path, one I feel for myself, in my own cage—I wish I could I ask you without burdening you, I feel as though I’ve already been too much. That I’ve done too much. Seen more than you wanted me to, and I am ashamed. Ashamed that I know you would try your best, if I just asked. But I can’t. No one hears you now, this life has made us all deaf.
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