The heaviness blanketing me feels like an institutionalised parolee, free yet still bound in the snuggery of their incarceration. I try and focus on the cello slicing through my laptop speakers and fail. The sun slides from behind a cloud like a new sunrise and consoles me; its ability to smoothen even the roughest of seas softens the stiffness of my skin and lessens the surrounding storm. My body no longer tolerates the presence of any chemical not made by itself, even then it’s hard pushed to welcome what it created. A warm glow rises like a sun in my heart and the stabbing harassment of the cacophony of sounds that are my children begin to retreat, or perhaps my ears relax after a moment of high alert, I’m unsure which is true.
Maybe I think too much and my body is too afraid of itself. The depths my thoughts traverse have no bounds to which I have little control (by that I mean no control at all). I witness my awareness and smile, at least internally, at my tumultuous madness. I have spent an inordinate stretch of time dwelling in the cavity between my ears that the rest of my body no longer remembers who I am, and it’s not afraid to brusquely banish any whiff of reconcile. I think somewhere in the early years of infancy my body realised just how uncomfortable life was and evicted my awareness to the top floor of the building. No longer can I negotiate (and re-negotiate) terms of a truce between body and mind with whisky and benzos, I am forced to endure the white-knuckle adventure of a raging war, a war my body fights hard to win, with many casualties, and fatalities, on both sides; when the sun bathes the dead, does it make them look as beautiful as it makes me feel?
Yet here we are—mind, body and me. Inmates forced into a solitary cell with competing convictions. We must find common ground, a way to co-exist, before the psychopath slits the throat of the conman who belligerently beguiles the only one of us who is innocent into falsely confessing the sins of us all.
