Words From Room 104

PATIENT 104

White bed sheets

Rainbow pills

They're all that adds colour to my life

They go down down down until the white turns fuzzy

Muted

Bleeding together into soft blurs that huge that sharp

prick of a needle tearing into flesh

The red that spills and spills until

The drip drip drip of the IV silences it.

Turns it white

Sleep, they say

You're supposed to sleep.

Let it all go white and nothing

But I hate the white

It's the hot searing of pain down my limbs

It's the cold flooding of fatigue that seeps like hemlock in my veins 

I hate the fuzziness, it's the blurring of fog in my brain

Scrambling thoughts and ideas and words until the only thing that stays is white

Don't fight it, they say

You've cared too much, they say

You've felt too much

Stop it! They scold.

But feeling is the only colour in me

Let it bleed out- let it dull- let it dim-

Make it white.

But I hate white, I scream

It burns me, it hides me, it doesn't recognize me

The white mirror shows a face not my own

I lose myself in the white until

A scrap of white paper around my wrist lets me know- 

I'm Patient 104.

I'm blue now

The blue of a hospital gown

The blue of surgical masks

The blue of a sky before rain

I'm the blue of seasonal depression.

I'm the blue of slow music.

Blue is nice, it is a beloved childhood blanket around tired shoulders

It is the cold shock that jolts a white brain out of stupor

It is the sizzle of water hitting burning flesh

Let me be blue, I cry

Let me feel and feel and feel till I become the blue sky

Let me run and run and run 

Till I become the blue brook

Let me sing and sing and sing until

I become the bluebird on that green tree.

Blue is freedom

Blue is a body without white hot pain

Blue is a mind that whispers platitudes and lullabies.

But the white in my veins throb

Coating my nerves

Pulling them under the white ocean

Down down down until it reaches the black.

Let me be black

Black like dreamless sleep

Like closed eyelids after tiring days

Like deep night that fills every pore with silence

Let me be that silence.

I welcome Black with open arms, my dear sister,

You are as the Poets sang

Sweet sedation

The relief of deep space

You hold the stars in your nothingness

I long to be you- O peace

I plunge into you 

I swim and swim and swim

Until I forget all that white told me

Until all the fragments of my failed humanity

Is coated in the bliss

Of oblivion.

DEFENCE OF THE BODY

Your Honour,

She made me do it.

She saw the vines grow and spread and twist themselves around me,

She saw them tear and pierce and squeeze-

Until the disfigured fragments of my cells screamed her name,

And she shrugged.

She touched the barely cooled corpse of my motivation and handed me a laptop.

Your Honour,

She was the void.

The apathy in her eyes blazed as she saw me cry and cry and cry

For crumbs and leftovers 

And smelled the rot that seeped through the cracks of my veins as I begged and begged and begged

And she said "I don't have time for this".

Your Honour,

She made this happen.

As childhood drained into faded adolescence, I picked the best flowers of youth for her,

 I poured my heart into her platter, charmed it with song and the spells of failed beauty-

She threw it away, Your Honour.

She said, "more"

And more and more and more.

She said, not this. 

Not this and not thus

Be finer, be greater

Sand down your edges and plaster those cracks

Paint over those blemishes, cut away the flab 

Be distinct, be different

But not too different

Be unique, but only as the prettiest ones are unique

Be flawed, but only when it looks good on the screens

Your Honour

I twisted the knife.

I plunged it in and bore the pain and cried in pieces

Because this time, your Honour

She was hurting too.

She deserved it, your Honour.

Not Guilty.

ADVISE FROM A SICK GIRL

When you’re in love with a sick girl,

You love for her too. 

Sometimes her body is a thorn piercing through the trappings of love like flimsy wrapping paper torn open by a child on Christmas.

Sometimes her mind is a distorted mirror in a Funhouse blurring your face into different shapes and sizes

Sometimes her bones are rusted motors dumped in a junkyard and forgotten by all.

Sometimes, she is not who you love at all.

She is a butterfly trapped in a Venus Flytrap, slowly dissolving in the acidic pool of her own blood.

Sometimes, you are fiction to her, a figment of her twisted imagination that frames lies into beautiful fairytales where the princess lives in a castle and her bones don’t ache.

Sometimes, you understand, that ache is all she is.

She is pain distilled in a bottle stoppered with a cork of madness, stored high on an apothecary shelf,

High and high where sunlight doesn’t reach and wind doesn’t touch- where you would not find her.

You see, sometimes pain is her distant mother, waiting for her past nightfall with day old food lovingly preserved under a metal plate.

You see, madness is the folktales that soothed her through childhood fevers, 

It is the cool washcloth on a burning forehead.

You see, sometimes madness is all she is.

She is whispers of darkness spoken in back alleys and shady corridors, illegal deals that change dirty hands through hushed consultation.

Sometimes she is nothing but the ghost of your nightmares that disappear as you open your eyes.

You see, sometimes she vanishes by daylight.

When you’re in love with a sick girl,

You love her sickness too.

You love her sickness when she hates the very smell of it wafting around her in poisonous spirals.

You love her sickness when she detests the very shape of it on her lap and demanding attention like a crying babe with a stomachache.

You love her sickness when the very taste of it makes her gag, the bitterness of it sinking down until her whole windpipe tastes of metal bursting into acrid flames.

Most importantly, however, when you’re in love with a sick girl, 

You hate her sickness too.

You hate her sickness even when she clutches it close like a brother lost to a war, reunited after many years.

You hate it even when she caresses her pain with gentle fingers, hugging it close with the affection of a thousand mothers.

You hate it even when she clasps her ache and giggles with it under covers, sharing secrets like two schoolgirls playing hooky.

When you’re in love with a sick girl,

You love her when all she loves is the pain.

When you’re in love with a sick girl,

You love her when she believes that pain is her only lover.