|
|
Asylum
I feel trapped. By this body, by this mind, by this world. This reality holds me as its prisoner. There’s something inside me longing for freedom. But I can’t make it. I can’t quite reach. I see it. Or rather, something in me sees it. I’m not sure what I’m reaching for, but the fact that I can’t get there is slowly killing me.
I think I’ve heard everything. Every diagnosis they could throw at me. Everything to keep me behind these bars. They say I’m paranoid, delusional, manic-depressive. They say that the places I talk about and the things I remember, that they’re only false memories. Creations of a shattered mind.
I was a genius once, you know. Before all of this. Now I’m a chained and muzzled dog, forgotten in the snow. I snapped. That’s what they told me. That I snapped. Sometimes people who are extremely brilliant can be extremely fragile as well. Sometimes it gets to be too much. Sometimes we reach the point where we know too much and think too logically to survive. Sometimes we logic ourselves to death. I logicked myself to death. I killed him and in the process I killed me too.
It was right. My though process, that it. It was all right. I understand that a life is a life, but there is something fundamentally flawed in the concept that all humans are equal. He was one of those that probably would have been killed at birth if they had known what he would become. I killed him because it made sense.
The blood was what woke me up. The warm blood on my hands. I hadn’t thought about it. I had dehumanized him. But that blood. I knew I had crossed a line. He was human after all. I was curled up in the yard when the police came. I know forensics and I know it would have been pointless for me to run. I had worked with some of these people before. I had total faith in them. I still do.
I had a psychotic breakdown. That’s what they say, anyway. I’m not crazy. That breakdown was a thinking period. It was a time for me to think through what I’d done. To logic it all away and dig myself a grave. That’s what I’m doing still. Digging myself a grave, and when I finish I’ll lay down to die. I just want to have my thoughts in order first.
The moon is beautiful tonight. The way it glows and the corona you can see around it if you look hard enough and the sky conditions are just right. Like a rainbow around it. And the stars. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve loved the stars. They make me feel small. They remind me how much is out there. They remind me of all the things I don’t know.
The first time I howled at the moon a guard came from down the hall to watch me. But by that time I didn’t care. Let him watch. It felt right, so I didn’t care. I’m not crazy, no matter what they think. It felt right. And I think that maybe, somewhere, killing that man felt right. Not so much the taking of life, but the hunt and the knowing that I was eliminating a threat.
I can see the woods from here. I want to run. I’m shut up in here all the time. I want to run. I want to feel the wind on my face. I want to stand out in the sunlight. I want to run. If I really wanted to I could get out, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be worth it. After all, I’d still be a prisoner.
This body, this mind, this world, this reality play host to a soul that cannot be happy and cannot be complete in a human life. These walls of flesh are my prison, not the walls of concrete and cinderblocks. My mind imprisons my hunter’s heart and my body stands in the way of my wingéd soul’s flight. These bars I stand behind feel more like a stone metaphor than a true prison. This life is its own prison.
I need to leave this place. I’m digging my grave, sorting out my thoughts, and when I’m done I’ll be free. When I finish that I can leave this body behind and become who I truly am.
Or perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps it really is all just the creation of a shattered mind. But even if it is a lie, it’s a beautiful one. The broken shards of a stained glass window glittering on the floor, the remnants of a powerful mind.
|
|
