Rambling

Slumber

Lying awake, I can’t help but picture the end.

I feel the fear I know will accompany me there.

Right now, that fear is what keeps me awake.

It takes a long while, but eventually it quiets.

As I finally start to drift off into a quiet sleep,

I look forward to the timeless hours that await,

The peaceful nothingness that will envelop me.

I can’t help but think that if the end is like this,

Maybe it really isn’t something to fear after all. 

Lullaby

I fall asleep to the sound of your voice,

The soft melody giving soundtrack to my dreams.

I doubt I’ll ever find someone like you,

Or hear a voice nearly as sweet,

But the music you make isn’t meant for my ears.

I’m just a fan, hoping for a ticket to your concert.

Until then, I will keep on listening,

Humming along while you play for someone else.

I cry myself to sleep.

The End

The ending is so predictable.

I can just about see it.

I can tell you this won’t end well.

I almost feel the tears falling,

And I can just about sense my anguish.

The ending won’t be anything new;

It will be just like all the others,

Full of sadness and anger,

Bitterness before the final acceptance.

We’ll both end up getting hurt,

One of us more noticeably.

We both already know how this will end,

But we haven’t the ability to accurately imagine

What will happen between now and then,

So we’ll let ourselves get there, anyway.

Wretched

The guilt, it consumes you.

It eats you all up inside,

And it makes you feel like

You’re a horrible person.

You begin to disgust yourself,

But the guilt is what proves

That you are good at heart.

It is only once the guilt leaves—

When you start to feel justified,

Like you’ve done nothing wrong—

That you know you’re truly gone.

Walls

She built up walls to protect herself,

But she surely wasn’t an architect,

And so the walls ended up all ugly.

It seemed that no one cared enough

To attempt to get past them, to her.

She knew she should tear them down,

But their creation had taken much work,

And she was scared to get rid of them.

She resolved to pretty them up a bit,

And so she covered up their ugliness.

She added layer upon layer of paint,

And eventually, her facade became

Approachable, even pretty in a way.

People even tried to come up to her,

And some tried to see past those walls.

A few attempted to tear them down,

To see what lay beneath the surface,

But they always ended up stopping.

Everyone walked away after a while,

Because underneath all the layers

And layers of pretty, pretty paint,

The ugly foundation was still there.

Therapy

She went to a therapist to figure out what was wrong with her. She asked him to cure her of her issues.

She didn’t know where to begin when he asked what were her exact problems.

“I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and you answer yes or no. All right?”

She nodded, yes.

“Do you sometimes have trouble falling asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever get inexplicably angry at people or life in general?”

She said, “Yeah.”

“How about sad? Do you ever become sad for no apparent reason?”

“Yes,” she said, looking down at her lap. She hadn’t realized the multitude of her problems, she realized, and she now feared they were even worse than she originally thought.

“Do you ever feel nervous around other people, or anxious in social situations?”

“Yes, all the time,” she admitted.

“Would you say you spend a lot of your time stuck in delusions wherein you dream up imaginary, perfect situations for yourself?”

She nodded and kept on staring down at her hands in her lap, not trusting herself to speak again.

“Do you ever feel overcome by guilt at the thought of mistakes long past?”

Nod.

“Have you ever pondered things that you couldn’t quite understand, like religion or the universe, and felt unbearably overwhelmed?”

Nod.

“Do you sometimes spend your time worrying about the future and suddenly wish you could make time stop?”

Nod.

As the questions continued, she found there not to be a single question that didn’t apply to her.

“Do you ever think you might be crazy?”

She looked back up at him, and said, “All the time.”

He was silent for a few moments as he jotted something down on that notepad that all therapists seemed to have. When he looked back up at her, he looked sad.

“Well, do you know what’s wrong with me?” she asked, her voice slightly shrill.

“Yes, I believe I do,” he responded.

“Is it bad?” She knew, though, that it had to have been bad. Of course, it was bad.

“Well, that depends on how you look at it.”

She stared at him, waiting for him to continue, which he did after only a moment.

“You seem to be suffering from a severe case of humanity, and I’m afraid there’s little I can do for you. The cure is, I’m sorry to say, fatal,” he said with a shrug.

“That’s it?” she asked, thinking he had to be joking—waiting for the punch line.

“Yes. Best to embrace it, I suppose.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” she mumbled, distraught.

“Well, that I can help you with.”

Imprisoned

She took herself as a captive,

When she ventured to run away.

Bored of her all her surroundings,

She decided it was time to leave.

She didn’t go anywhere at all,

But she knew that she couldn’t stay,

So she locked herself inside her mind,

And she threw away the key.

Abrupt

What would you do if I left without closing,

Just a short, abrupt and haphazard ceasing?

Would you throw a fit if I just decided to stop

Would you easily move on without caring at all?

Would you do anything if I decided to just—

My Reality

I suppose it could be said that I freaked out a bit. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I’ll never be one of those people who can take change in stride, so when my world got turned upside down, it ripped me to shreds.

In hindsight, I probably should have noticed what was going on, but in the beginning, the changes were so small. I’d see things that weren’t technically there, but it’d just be in flashes. I’d think I saw something in the corner of my eye, but when I turned, there would be nothing there. This didn’t happen that often, so I chalked it up to nothing more than sleep deprivation. For a while, it honestly seemed like that was all it was.

It took a while for my “hallucinations” to increase. In addition to an increase in the frequency of the visual “delusions,” I would sometimes hear things, almost like words whispered from too far away. I would ask the person next to me if they’d said anything, but they never had. It was around this point that I started getting the weird looks. Before, everyone else had seemed content to ignore me and leave me be, but then I think I started to creep them out, because it seemed like they were going out of their ways to get away from me. It was like there was something wrong with me, and everyone could see it, but I was just confused.

It honestly wasn’t such a large problem, but the “illusions” persisted. They began to increase in length. I would see people. They would just look at me, everywhere I went. I would point it out to my family, ask them why there was a stranger blatantly staring at me. They never saw them. 

I stopped being able to tell the difference between my reality and the reality everyone else was in. This was when my parents began to get me “help.” At first, they didn’t want to send me away, though that was what their friends and even my extended family recommended. They got me a shrink. He talked to me, and sometimes I would listen. When he told my parents to send me away, they listened. 

They told me the place I was going would be nice, and it was, with nice doctors and nice patients and nice thick white walls that held in my nice screams. They fed me nice drugs that were supposed to make me think nice thoughts.

But the voices were still there, and sometimes the faces still joined them. I just couldn’t react to them. I couldn’t really react to anything, actually. I was numb, but I didn’t mind.

To the rest of the world, it was official: I was crazy.

I don’t think I was crazy, though—or, I don’t know. Maybe I was. All I know is that the voices that no one else could hear never said mean things. The faces I saw never glared. They never judged me or hurt me, so I don’t know why the “real” people in my life were so eager to rid me of them.

Eventually, the faces started to glare at everything in “reality,” and the voices told me to just let go and get away from everything that was “real.” They were so much nicer, so why would I listen to my “family” and try to get rid of them? They hated “reality,” and under their influence, I started to hate it, too.

Their guidance was what let me leave my old reality behind, and I’ve been here with them ever since.

It’s nice here.

Fragile Figurine

She was holding it too tight.

It was fragile.

She knew that, but she couldn’t let go. In that tiny glass figurine seemed to lie all of their trysts. She could still remember seeing it for the first time, at the quaint little shop they had stumbled upon. She’d commented on how cute she thought it was, and just like that, it had been hers. 

It had been lying on her drawer for the entire period that was their relationship. The eyes of the small, yellow bird had seemed so kind and reassuring. Somehow, they reminded her of him, of her feelings for him.

The bird was so fragile. It wasn’t the only fragile thing in the room.

It was odd, how her immediate reaction to the news was to grip the bird in her hands, but she knew she had to do it. She had to get rid of it.

It was ridiculously fragile. Just like the relationship it represented to her.

She squeezed it as hard as she could. The bird—It was oh, so fragile.

She thought about what he had told her, replayed every single last word in her mind as she thought about what had thrown away.

The bird’s eyes were mocking as she glared at it, willing it to break. She wanted it to be gone. She wanted it obliterated.

The bird was so fucking fragile.

She was more fragile.

Tears came as she tried to break it. Why? How could he completely destroy her, yet she couldn’t destroy one fucking glass bird? How was the bird stronger than her? The bird wasn’t anything. It was hollow and lifeless; she could literally see right through it. She refused to let it win.

The bird shattered, and she shattered right along with it.