Buddy’s hand untied the silk bind on his journal. Flipping through its pages, he realised how useful it had been to him—a prized steed in his stable of earthly possessions. The realisation ceased as soon as he found a blank page for the entry.
For a moment, it looked like everything was frozen in place when he inhaled deeply. Just as instantaneously, he exhaled, hoping to dispel the build-up of stress in his body—an action he once described as racking a shotgun, his shotgun, while gesturing by pointing to the temple of his head. To him, the stress in the body was from stress in his mind.
“Whew, okay.”
A silence followed when the tip of the pen touched the page.
“For the longest time, I had held out hope that someday, sooner even, you would see what was screaming loud in your face. I have had to thug it out by invoking coping utterances like “we move”, “fairs”, and “charge it to the game” ad infinitum. I did this to be able to manage the heaviness, the arrhythmic palpitation that preceded every panic and the discordant tummy rumbling that you easily set off. It took some time. It took some strength and some patience, but thank heavens! Now, I no longer do.
The triggers you elicited by being you held me in what felt like an eternal captivity. I was a long-standing prisoner in both my mind and heart. It was a hell I would not wish on anyone. Perhaps you may find it difficult to comprehend or even imagine what my incarceration felt like. Here, let me help you paint in graphic detail the torturous experience, by your hands, in the prison of my heart and of my mind.
In the prison of my heart, I was shackled by heartstrings made of woollen cells of the heart fastened to both my hands and feet and pulled wide apart. My hands had semi-circular holes in one end for a heartstring to pass through and the other end to lodge in holes made in the walls of each atrium.
Similar perforations were made on both feet to allow for the same binding mechanism. Only here, the feet were positioned at an angle of 90 degrees in opposite directions, and they were attached to the walls of both ventricles.
For whatever reason, in my torment, I was goaded by an apparition with the markers of a warden who embodied my emotional state, representing every nuanced gesture from you. It was an affront to the redamancy I desired. His daily heckling and outright disdain inflicted what I initially perceived to be irreversible damage on my heart.
In the prison of my mind, I woke up every day in a white room whose hue was so pristine, so spotless, that the tiniest bit of stain became this big bullseye – a neon sign you could not miss even if you were stricken by cataracts in both eyes. You could describe this huge signboard as the self-awareness of a very sane person who is the only buck-naked person among other sane, clothed people.
In this room, I was straitjacketed by the many abstractions of self-loathing anytime I walked through its door. This white room seemed to generate a labyrinthine simulation whose sole purpose was to further your onslaught.
On the day I overheard you dismissively deny to your colleague the expression of my love to you, I faced the projection of ‘The Mirror’.
Ha, The Mirror! What a foe. I was placed in front of what looked like the exterior of Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. It hovered and moved with my every step, reflecting all of my person. Whenever I thought about anything that would disqualify me in your eyes, it reflected the perfected version. Say it was my height, for instance; it will morph from its base form into a 6’6 Adonis. After it had succeeded in driving home the point, it would revert to its original state and move, waiting to bring forth the next perfected copy of my weakness. You get the picture. Only God knows how deep my battles with ‘The Mirror’ were and how I still managed to keep my sanity.
Let me tell you about the first appearance of ‘The Void’ when I was rudely awakened by your apparent disgust at my enthusiasm and happiness to speak to you.
In the room of my mind’s penitentiary, there was a visibly heavy cloud hanging over my head. With every passing second, the thundering and lightning show rose in frequency. In direct proportionality, the cloud grew darker with the number of times I thought about how my obvious joy served as anathema to yours.
Do you know what happened whenever the cloud became pitch black?
It would release its acidic precipitation, searing my flesh. Every painful drop on my skin chipped away meaning until I was hollowed out. All that remained after every encounter with ‘The Void’ was a husk.
Even now, I cannot bring myself to recount what it was like with ‘The Weight’. A chill ran across the line of my spine whenever I relived it. Such horror!
Gosh! I have fought for my life.
My experience in both prisons always left me feeling lifeless. They were difficult to deal with, yet I still found a way.
How?
Deep down within me, I have had to bury the truth. So deep did I bury it that you would have to travel the littered pathways of an epoch to exhume its remains. That was how I did it.
The sarcophagus of what held my hidden devotion to you and what I had infinitely cherished would have by now melded harmoniously with the soil of my heart.
Far in the abyss of my heart lay a sad feeling, one I am all too familiar with. Man, my head hurts so bad.”
Buddy sighed heavily. With the puff of air followed a relief long restrained as he wrote.
Beads of sweat lay on the forehead of a tired man who for all his life had wanted peace – peace in love or its pursuit, peace in a career’s success or its search, peace in every possible situation of his life. So many times he reached the finish line and failed to cross. Nevertheless, the will to keep going burned brightly in his eyes, especially under the sheen of his lamp
Grey
Curator of moments, collector of whispers