Don’t Turn Back.

I wake up feeling like a message in a stoppered bottle.

But I broke the glass because that’s what it said to do in an emergency. It was that or run out of air, you see. I’m so many shattered words, jagged fragments of each letter carefully aligned.

I hold the pieces in my hands, pieces of a past ill and disjointed, pieces out of place. I am each letter divided. I am a word frozen on your tongue. I lose my voice sometimes, somewhere along the way to this junkyard of the mind.

If I wait just a little longer will the band start up, will the world go on just as it did before?

I feel elemental desires running through me but there is no bridge. I cannot cross this river for I am blind, deaf, dumb – stopped at the Rubicon. This is me, waiting.

This is the pause in the movie, an unplanned intermission. So many tangled interruptions, I’m floating in alphabet soup. But I stopped moving well before I noticed this breakdown.

I’m not even nervous. I know I should be but I’m just waiting, with a worn out thumb. I’m a hitchhiker with no particular direction, drunk on heat and fury. Stumbling, indistinct and strange. I want my life back.

There are wires alive in the endings of my nerves. Even where there are no nerves I feel as though something wants to break free. Free from this self of mine that seems too firmly attached, loose from this by-the-numbers game. I’m perfectly ill-timed for my own sense of perpetual indecision.

Coming to in the middle of a grass field, I remember an empty building from my dreams. It’s filled with every moment that I would rather forget. I feel like a terrorist in my own mind, sometimes. Forcing into the light of day all those things that we let go by because we have no choice or because we just want to survive. But I don’t want to just survive anymore.

I don’t want to be a body without form. I want to inhale and feel every response, to meditate on the very fact of being where I am and knowing what I know.

If I could undo the years of fear I would. Give me half a chance and I’d trade memory for a life – any day, any life. I’d cut a deck of cards with a stranger and tell them to keep the bottom stack. Pick a point, and I’ll go on from there because it would feel better than all the lessons I’ve learned so far. I’m sick of learning that I can’t escape myself, that I can’t go any further than the borders of my own mind. And sick of waiting for a tomorrow that never comes.

I stopped listening to your apologies a long time ago, so now I think I’ll just go on with things. I’ll find just one moment in which I feel like myself, and start from there. There’s little to a first step. It’s not turning back that’s hard.