(010)

I didn’t know I was here until the grass grew through my ribs. Until my back reached out to the sky and I found myself floating on the ground like it was water, the wind became waves and washed me outwards to the ocean of grass. I’ll never forget that feeling, a mistaken peace that I was swept into, a cloying nothingness that settled around and over me and I slept. Even while awake, I slept and became dull, became lifeless, a shell of the passions I used to hold. It wasn’t peace but paralysis, because until those first grass roots rose through my belly, I didn’t know that I had become stagnant.

I let myself slip, I drank the night sky with my fingers, I pulled it closer like a blanket, thinking it was poetic, thinking that my sleeplessness didn’t matter, that I have nothing to do tomorrow anyway. I became my own Delilah, my own bony hands winding around and cutting my hair to sell it for the silver light of a cloudy day with nothing to do. For a roof to hide me from those starry nights, I cut off my ear, selling it for deafness so I couldn’t hear the call of a world I was now too scared of.

When I first came here, all I wanted was to never be afraid, but now I’m stuck here in this goddamned room, paralysed and broken and wondering if this anxiety will ever go away. I’ve hidden my heart underneath the boards of my chest, and even when the world comes knocking, I’ll pretend I’m not tormented by its beat. Now, in the night it thuds against my skin, begging to be let out, but all the panic of reality will creep up my fingers and by morning, it will lie quiet once more.

Lie quiet, children, and don’t forget the world of possibility waiting for you. Dream of what you want to be, the places you will go, the people you will meet. Dream of the things that lie waiting for you, children, tangled up in the light of stars and Broadway lights, that world of possibility just waiting for the day when you’re allowed to stay up late and go wherever you would like. No one ever tells you about the fear.

Sure, they tell you that the real world is a scary place, that you’ve got to make your own way and buy your own food and work at a job until you have enough money to do something you really want to do, but they never tell you about the paralysing fear. The fear that creeps in, bit by bit until you wake up one morning, too afraid to leave your house. You look back and only then notice that you slowly made safer and safer choices, ones that wouldn’t get you hurt, or in trouble, or would make you broke. When you made them you thought you were growing up, but now you see it as fear. Fear to have something fail on you, fear of dealing with everything that could happen. You realise that all this time you weren’t actually growing, but shrinking, smaller and smaller every day, and now, you’re not much more than a bag of skin, bones and organs in one tiny room of a house in a city that is miniscule compared to the rest of the damn universe.

What happened that made you like this? Since when did you almost go into cardiac arrest at the thought of calling someone on the phone? When did you start making excuses to not leave your house? What are you busy with, really?

Nothing.

And that’s where I’m at right now. Nothing. Too afraid to do anything, too scared of being a failure to not. There are days when I resolve to live forever, and there are days when I’m not sure I’ll make it to this July. I’m grown in, tangled in weeds and the sky is pressing down on my head, and gods, I am scared. There’s no resolution to this yet, only the realisation that this peace is paralysis, and I can’t stay here forever.