Sunday Suicide

Everyone avoids the question. I avoid the answer. It doesn't make it go away.

Psychosis

I'm not sure that even I know how I am still sitting here. Last evening I became so removed from reality that I didn't think I'd survive the night. I couldn't feel anger or sorrow or frustration, or my own hands on my skin. Everything was numb.
I had to test myself. That, I felt. Perhaps the most alive I had felt in weeks. I had to keep proving to myself that I was real, but somehow managed to stop before resembling a Virginia Ham.
It really does frighten me. I am frightened that so many decisions have to be my own and that there's no-one who can help me make them. I'm frightened that despite my best efforts, my days are getting shorter, colder and darker than ever before. I'm terrified that my nights are black.

I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me. You live with the threat of my extinction... I live with it too.

Sunday Secrets

Today, being Sunday, is www.postsecret.com day. Here is a secret from today's post:

Today

I have run out of distractions. I forced myself out of bed at lunchtime, after watching the boats on the harbour for an hour and a half. I took my time showering, painting, moisturising, brushing and straightening and told myself that I could not put off tidying the apartment anymore. I did the washing, put away everything that was out of place and cleaned the already clean kitchen despite it not being used since Tuesday when the last meal was prepared, and the fact that the cleaner comes tomorrow at 9am to re-clean it anyway. I tidied my room, removed all hazards from the floor, folded my clean washing and took extra care to pack my Chanel 2.55 Chain Bag away as recommended by the company.
Now that everything is just as it should be, I don't know what to do next. I keep moving from room to room hoping to find a purpose. I sat in the Living Room analysing the weather, partly angry that Sydney is mocking me with what may be the last summer day when I had no energy or purpose to share in it. I sat on the floor of the Library hoping to find sudden inspiration from the spines staring down at me. I took out the rubbish, avoided the reem of photocopied textbook pages the Happy Lady had mailed me, lay on my bedroom floor then wrote a shopping list for when I can force myself to the supermarket (toothpaste, red pen, moisturiser).
What am I waiting for? I have done everything my apartment has expected of me. I am dressed with shoes ready to go out. But I have no appointments in my diary, no phone calls inviting me out, no spontaneous activities that my heart is begging me to do. The clock in the foyer reminds me in 15 minute intervals of the time I am wasting.
I have another 8 days until my family return home. If I wanted I could throw a party carrying on for days and nights to come. I could invite the middle-aged Porsche driving creeps from the elevator to dinner and drink too much and do Karaoke. I could lie dead for days with no-one noticing.
But none of these are things that I want to do. I still want my cup of tea. If I were on the Gold Coast I would arrive uninvited and drink tea and talk with M. for hours and distract her from her dying mother and let her distract me from myself. I would feel partly human again. Instead I have my clean apartment to keep me company.

From My Perspective

It stands at my window, big as the sky.

I am so sick of listening to the inside of my own head. I am warping reality with my dreams, so that I don't know what really happened and what didn't. I stop for charity workers on the street just so they can ask me how my day is with feigned interest, and I can lie about how great it has been. I am sick of my own four walls. I opened a window despite the air-conditioning just to hear the traffic on the bridge; to remind myself that I am not alone and there are lives to be lived.
I need some company. I want to sit alongside someone and talk and think and feel and analyse and gossip and imagine, just for an afternoon, to break the chill and hollowness that has eaten my soul. But I'm not sure if there's anyone who would want to.

Someone found a way to say it.

www.postsecret.com

Tick, Tick, Tick

I am exhausted. Every inch of me aches as though I have run for a lifetime. I find it hard to do the mundane, everyday tasks; brush my hair, clean my teeth, go to work. Everything is an effort. Everyone intimidates me. Every second I want to cry.
I try to work hard. If I can distract myself from the increasing heaviness within, perhaps I may just make it to the end. But it always finds a way to creep back. The few minutes of searching through the storeroom, the break of silence between morning tea chatter, the solitude of making fresh sheets into a bed. It never really goes away, and I'm frightened it never will. How can anyone live like this?
And if there's anything I hate as much as this feeling, it's the silence when I just stop. It reminds me how alone I have become. Perhaps more lonely than anything, and I wish I could break it with a hug, a cry and a cup of tea like I used to. But things are different now, the void is deeper and more mature than before. I want to fill it up with people and parties to cover the silence, but no amount of champagne or entertainment will ever be enough. I don't know what will?

Out

I forced myself out of the apartment all weekend to break the cycle of monotony and frustration. I walked the city streets at midnight in the rain. I sat alone in a restaurant in the small hours of the morning hoping the NYC image would make me feel closer to the world. I stood in the rain on purpose. I got stuck in mud and didn't take my shoes off at the door. I showered with my shoes on. I ignored phone calls, didn't reply to messages and asked for apologies.
Does this sound like me? Not to anyone who really knows me, but I tried it on for size. I tried it on hoping, praying that I had discovered the answer to breaking free. Did it work? I didn't find an answer. If anything I discovered death within my shadow; creeping up on me as I run out of places to hide.

Today, I danced in the rain. Just that phrase sounds like freedom. Before today I would have said so. But having done just this, I don't feel any more liberated, or refreshed, or happy. The sadness imprinted within me can't be washed away. I can't dance the feeling out of me or scream it from my lungs. It sits in the bottom of my heart, poisoning my blood. To extinguish it would mean bleeding myself dry.

RIP

People die everyday. The hospital where I work is full of them. Some will go quietly, others in glorified religious ceremonies. Some unexpectedly, and others with scandal.
Celebrities endure the glamour of press releases and public memorials. The world tunes in and becomes an accessory to the final farewell, with every detail imprinted for years to follow. Last year it was Michael Jackson, Christmas; Brittany Murphy, today; Alexander McQueen. Who's life is on tomorrow's line?
Google is hot. Twitter is trending 'RIP'. I wonder if I'll even make the obituaries.

No matter how much Chanel, layers of make-up or sleep I accumulate, I can't lose the intensity building inside. I may be real today, but perhaps not tomorrow? I can lose myself at any hour of the day, and am gambling against myself as to how soon it will win. If only I knew what 'it' was. Is it failure? A sentence of unhappiness to plague the rest of my life, however long or short it may be? Perhaps death?

If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, it's timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

I do not have answers. I'm not even sure I'm aware of the questions I am asking. All I know is that I cannot continue to deteriorate as I am, and there is nothing more that I can do to stop myself. I need a miracle.

The Fig Tree

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

We succeed to make up for our failures. We love to cover the hate. We lie to hide from the truth. We create to destroy and smile to disguise the tears. We ultimately live to die.

Thursday Night

Having returned to my hometown for a single night, I have already returned to my since forgotten mentality. My room has remnants of the me I left behind splattered on my daffodil walls and now that it's confronting me, I am finding it hard to fight back.
I have already had my mother's expectations forced down my throat despite my diplomatic and rational protests. I have failed in maintaining my stance. I have gone to my room to hide from the troubles I can leave at the door. I still have the bags that I carry within. I can't wait to go home.

A Change in the Weather

If I asked myself a week ago, I never would have believed I would, but today I visited the Happy Lady. And I surprised myself. Nothing like others of her breed, I appreciated the overall visit. The antique plum walls, the suede couch, the tissue box on the coffee table as an unavoidable centrepiece, and of course the expected conversation. But for once nothing I said made me feel absurd. She understood my justification of living within society's conforms, she challenged me giving up what I believe in, and accepted my inability to explain what I felt because everything inside is a swirl.

Imagine torrents of thoughts confined in the tiny mind that you contain. Each one is presented through a sentence, some long and descriptive, others brief and pointless. Each sentence spirals, following the one before it, until they spin so fast it’s all a blur; but in an attempt of desperation you reach out, trying to grasp a hold of something with an answer, even if it’s simply a clue. But what is it that you receive? A word, and then another; random words from random thoughts, and in a frantic attempt for clarity you put them together - simply to get nothing more than what you started with, except now, you truly are mystified.

By the end, I felt an honesty within me that I had forgotten I had. I had pushed it away for so long and created a mask dictated my social acceptance and the parameters set by society. I had denied myself any opportunity to survive, because I'm not sure I could go on living without finding my truth within. I'm not saying I've found it, I'm not even saying I'm close. But I know it is there, somewhere beneath the layers of cover-ups and floods of un-shead tears. I will get to it. I just need to do some spring-cleaning first.

Hubble, Bubble. Toil and Trouble.

As I become increasingly aware of myself, I have become less in control. Having felt void of emotion for so long, I can now feel it within me. Once simmering, it has begun to boil and will soon take over unless I can find a way to stop it. I'm just not sure if I'm strong enough.