To Be Unchained

 To be Unchained

Ask me what I would do if my synaptic chains no longer bound me and I would tell you that there are a thousand things I’d reach for to light the dark. I’d put on my glimmering sun pendant in any state, not a worry for the next time I’d wear it or the time after that. I’d read whatever book whenever I wanted to, fall asleep to dreams of stories set in fantasy realms and distant domains. Open the door. Take running steps. Pick wildflowers into ragtag bouquets. Climb the peach tree for the ripest fruit, braving the branches for a taste tart as lighthearted sass. Paint with every shade I have, render turquoise citadels and amaranth starfields over coral moors. Run a hand through my tangled hair. Part the umber waves with one movement. Roam sunflower meadows without shoes. Wake at dawn for breakfast at first light. Let go of waylaying fear in a steadying sigh. Go about my day like nothing is wrong. Believe for the first time since I was only nine that nothing is wrong. Live a year without crying. Play music just a bit too loudly, if only to set myself free. Stand without wanting to run. Breathe like I don’t fear air will escape me. Stare directly into your eyes unwavering. Hold my own gaze in the mirror. Hear the silence and hold steady, no scream behind closed lips. Cross the room in slow steps. Turn the doorknob of my own accord. Lift the shattered pieces from the floor. Stop wishing the night would end. Grab a pen without second-guessing, ink in any color at all. Speak above the din. Depart without waiting on myself to meet unreachable standards. Set aside years of wanting to just have, hundreds of miles and hours of struggling be damned. Wade farther into the waves. Catch a sunbeam on the open ocean, rising up from the silver surges to look skyward. Savor one last breath, slow and sustaining. Accept my fate in late night hours of wishing for morning. Say what needs to be said. Stop needing. Finally be free.

The Modus Operandi of Madness

The Modus Operandi of Madness

The world broke into a million shards, versicolor fragments of people, places, and states of being falling into oblivion. Every last shred of hope binding it together dissipated into nothingness, the evanescence sending its stability into collapse. All around me, reality lost form. There was only the grief left in the maelstrom, tethering me to existence in the absence of happiness. And that was how I found myself adrift, unable to place reason in this void without structure. My mind unraveled, the fibers regressing to the fight or flight mania I’ve found myself embracing many a time. The ticking of the clock remained in the distance, never ceasing to accommodate the death of sanity. Tick. Tick. Tick. One constant thrum shoving me further down an ink-black tunnel. This time there were no stars to burn through the murk, only the ashen shroud obscuring nebulas and myriad planets untouched. “Call me Wisteria,” I said to no one, just desperate to hear a voice disturb the silence. This is the modus operandi of madness, the telltale makeup of an entirely unclassifiable beast. Nothing ascribes to sense. Fervent pain is the only constant. The sky shifts from day to night in the flutter of a bat’s wing and sometimes no one can understand why. Unlike the physical body, the consciousness of the mind has different parameters. Those of us afflicted can only wade through the deepening mire in search of stability to bring us back to the real world. Alas, stability doesn’t want to be found, not here in the dark. Sometimes people can find us in this unstable labyrinth and lead us out into the waiting sunlight. At others, we despair and spend days trying to reach anything resembling normality. Death follows us like our own shadow, invisible when we collapse back into the darkness. We weep. We scream. We throw ourselves into the nearest object of our interest to stave off returning to these endless depths of uncertainty. It’s never enough. Distraction doesn’t extend itself into permanence. The cycle may be interrupted, but it never truly ends. Chained to our own minds, we remain helpless and afraid of the many sunrises to come. A world under the lens of madness is as tremulous as mist. Once your mind falls prey to the harsh reality of it, you’re branded with a mark that finds its way into the depths of your being. This is insanity as it speaks to the addled. It will be the language our minds speak until the earth stops spinning on its axis. Like travelers lost in the wilderness, we will keep on searching the universe for our refuge, never to reach the solace that doesn’t wait for us.

Waking Up

Waking Up

For a year, you were the sunrise that my world awakened to, the beating heart around which my whole existence centered. I saw nothing but you, could not spend a waking minute without your presence on my mind. What could I see beyond the most perfect element of my life, the most wondrous magic ever to grace my soul? 

It took me the longest time to learn the truth, to see that the dawn did not materialize at your behest nor did the stars glimmer because of your majesty. The world did not hold its breath when you entered a room. Cosmos were far greater than you could ever dream of being, and I had been so blind that my eyes could not see that. In many ways, I woke up, let the dream fade from my vision to view the reality it concealed. So much time was spent longing for you that my perspective was limited to black and white. For that tumultuous year, my grasp on reason was obscured by the brilliant light in my eyes. I let myself fall by the wayside, cried tears of lovelorn agony when left to my own devices, and wanted nothing more than to be yours. True, I could see the perfection in nature’s grand works of art, but to me, they were all tied to you. Separation was not a concept I could fathom, my mind so deeply besotted that your shadow fell over every surface. 

And then I woke up. 

Angels wept, hope shattered into a million shards, the earth stopped spinning for one terrified moment. Life was baffled by the shift in reality, by all the stars falling out of alignment as they tumbled back down to the world below. The Mirror of Understanding cracked, the truth so distorted that none could ever see things as they once were reflected on its visage again. The pages in the storybook reached their conclusion, leaving me with only The End instead of Happily Ever After. It was a goodbye, and alas, there was no beginning to follow it, only uncertainty hovering all around. So lost was I, without direction, unable to see the world as it had once been. Nothing held familiarity. For so long, all I had seen was you. Sun, sky, moon, shadow. Not one was without your mark. I’d written about them in relation to the feelings you gave me, and when at last, I had to cast them aside, I found myself alone in a world I did not know. That is the world I traverse now, direction eluding me as reason once had in the folly I knew to be love.

For now, I move through an unfamiliar landscape, seeking a path out of the endless labyrinth towards a future absent of your presence. The terrain is rugged, the sky overhead raining down on me at the darkest of moments, but still I persist. Far from the blissful Valhalla of newfound love I’ve ventured, past the jolt of emerging unprepared for reality’s bitter glare, I’m somewhere in between melancholic loneliness and wholehearted acceptance. A world without you still waits for me, and until my heart heals, I ache for another sunrise to warm this gelid void of night.

The Color of Childhood

The Color of Childhood

When the color was taken away, I was still a child. Nine years old, innocence still clinging to me like a comforting blanket. The rooms of my childhood house had been bright with color. Moss green covered the walls of the living room, evoking the jungles and forests of the books I read to conjure images of the world beyond my small sphere. Vivid coral warmed a little kitchen where I sat on weekends with plates of fluffy waffles doused in maple syrup, all a comfort to me that I never thought I would lose. The formal dining room, where I seldom got to eat but still found to be a lovely space, wore ochre gold from floor to ceiling, magnifying the brilliance of the sun’s rays when they filled the house with their undying warmth. I grew up in the embrace of wonderful color, my memories painted in these shades that rivalled those I’d seen on the canvases of even the best artists.

That year, I received the news that we were moving to California. This comforting house, with its green shutters and colorful rooms, would be lost to me once we vacated it to make way for this next phase of our lives. In all honesty, none of it felt real to me until the rooms were repainted in shades of cream. Our realtor had said this would help us sell the house, so the vibrant walls were concealed by lifeless tones without personality or distinction. I remember walking into the kitchen after it had been repainted, barely able to recognize it for the safe haven it had always been. Eggshell paint had drained it of all its beauty, leaving a drab and uninviting eating area that felt nothing like the one I’d previously known.

Green and gold became pasty white slabs within which I was expected to go about my life. Though I tried to keep living within this space, my heart told me this wasn’t home anymore, not really. My surroundings felt cold and distant, unrecognizable as the quaint home I’d spent my entire life in. When everything I loved was being taken from me, I no longer had the option of taking comfort in my warm childhood home. Only this pallid sepulcher greeted me each morning as I woke to another day.

After we left Texas and moved to Poison Oakley, I really did lose everything. Even though it took time for things to truly unravel and scar me deeper than any pain I’d known, I can still trace it all back to standing in a colorless house feeling my heart weep at what it was losing. That was the moment my childhood became devoid of color, forced to take on the somber shade of a world without mirth. Never again would my life be the same.

Prelude to a Fairy Tale

Prelude to a Fairy Tale

I wish I could follow the four winds, letting the gusts carry me to the land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Ravens, swans, and white horses could lead the way, their forms a beacon to that palace of gold that waits atop the horizon. When I get there, I could cast off my red shoes for slippers of glass, my feet twirling past midnight into gilded dreams and happy endings. Beanstalks could topple, towers of green felled by the sweep of an axe, and ells of  golden hair could be severed, but still the magic wouldn’t fade so long as I kept dancing toward an ever after.

For now I lay in a coffin of gleaming glass, caught in a spell that cannot be broken. A ruby apple full of poison lies beside me, one bite missing from its crimson surface. I wait in a tower in the clouds, combing my miles of hair by an open window waiting for a sign. My true love remains in enchanted stasis, unable to see me or know me for what I am to him. The fairies may bestow their enchantments and magic could hide out in the open, but for now things linger at a standstill until the witch’s curse comes to an end. The storybook is open, but the end of the story is obscured behind endless reams of paper. “And they lived happily ever after” is an uncertainty among these fantastical icons of Once Upon a Times and fairy tales that transcend the passage of years. There’s only so many instances one can be stolen away by the Snow Queen and lured astray by the promise of something greater before they begin to think that it’s all only that, a fairy tale. Jorinda doesn’t return to maiden form. The Beast remains a beast and Beauty doesn’t learn to love what lies beneath the surface. Towers stand untouched. The prince marries the wrong maiden while the mermaid dissolves into sea foam. Live in a fantasy world long enough and reality appears coarser when it returns to spirit you away back to the castle of ice and snow at the ends of the earth.

There’s only the hope to get you to keep dreaming, the promise of the storybook yielding treasure untold when the trials have been faced and the quests followed through. After all, maybe the struggles were just a test devised to assess the strength of your will. Surrounded by a world filled to the brim with enchantment and beauty among the tribulations, you can’t help but hold fast to the idea of a fanciful conclusion written in cursive script. “The End” can be interpreted so many different ways and lead to a thousand possible outcomes if you can get that far. Until then, slay the dragons that torment uncharted kingdoms. Journey over the miles to that land unreachable. Let your heart never stray from what it is you want most in life. In time, the fearsome trolls that reign will be vanquished. The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon will always be there, an ideal to chase away your darkest struggles when the sun has set to suppress the light.