An Open Gasket

I couldn’t come up with anything to write today. So. I just… wrote. I enjoy reading and writing stream of consciousness, but I’ve never shared mine before. Hopefully mine is interesting to you!

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Sometimes, when I’m feeling locked too tightly in my head and I need to unwind, I sit down in front of a blank word document and do my best to fill the page. Most of the time, it doesn’t work. I sit there and let the cursor blink back at me while I blink back at it. And in our blinking, we reach a rhythm, and if I can stay on beat, and open/close my eyes fast enough, it’s like the cursor never disappears at all.

That rhythm is silly, inconsequential, and something that makes no sense. And in that senselessness I find myself drawn out of my own mind like an outsider looking in. Staring at the mess of gray matter pushing against the walls of my skull. Staring like an outsider, at people having a conversation on a bus, or a tram.

My mind is sick, sometimes. And all I have are cures for its symptoms. It’s a gravity well, and I’m being tangentially slingshot around it’s optimal orbiting radius, slowly sapping some semblance of energy to keep myself putting along on the outskirts of annihilation. But the centrifugal force makes me feel carsick, like I did when I was a kid on those winding mountain roads that took me to my dad’s work on bring your kid to work day. Where I played computer games while he answered technical questions using jargon and initialisms I never asked to understand.

So, I roll down the window to throw up, and I leave my breakfast of two eggs, scrambled of course, all over the Ortega highway. I unbuckle my seatbelt and sit in the center seat, so I can stare straight ahead, we roll down the rest of the windows for fresh air, and I watch as the car passes over the road in front of me. On tight turns my stomach twists, but I don’t get the burning sensation in the back of my throat telling me I’m going to vomit anymore.

I sit there and I think, like I’m doing now. I make up stories in my head to keep my mind occupied, to take my thoughts off the path of the winding road, and onto the path of some stream of consciousness story. I loosen the handle on my mind’s gasket and allow my brain to decompress, to ventilate all the built up pressure so I don’t gag. I can’t gag. I was born without the reflex. But, I can throw up, I can do it physically and mentally. It is a purging. This is a purging. This is word vomit.

Right now, I’m too deep. I’m in the thick of it. My mind is wound too tightly, and like a cracking rubber band, I’m afraid it will rebound or snap. I don’t want to be a rebound, or a tracer. I don’t want to be erased, or face erasure. So, I keep all my scrapped stories, poems, and blogs saved on my hard drive. Both internally and outside. In it you'll find my will. The testament to what to do if I get pulled in.

My word vomit is usually filed carefully on Chipotle napkins, the backs of receipts, old handouts, and the back of my old hands. Old because I’ve had them longer than anything. They’ve been there to hold me when I can’t hold on anymore. To wipe my mouth, but I forgot my latest novel idea was on that napkin. Now the ink is smeared, like lipstick, but just around the corners of my mouth. The black streaks were characters, ideas, plot lines, and now they’re just smears. Forgotten as soon as they’re written.

I can read one or two of the words on the napkin. Falling. Then. I’m falling for them, back then, my mind takes me there and I remember the silly little games we’d play on that school bench. Your hands rake my hair and I cringe. You don’t see, but the contorted shape of my face shows how uncomfortable I am. I can’t tell you, because I needed you to think I’m perfect. But you never did. Because I’m ticklish.

Even now I squeem in my chair from something you did 8 years ago. And I saw your car yesterday, but I didn’t say anything because I don’t care.

But you always care, he says. And he’s right. He’s in the same place you are, except instead I see him in the best light. I can’t decide what he thinks, but here I decide he thinks I’m not perfect, and I’m actually fine with that.

Where do I go. I wander. In this carnival of written carnage. How can I take myself from the place I am to the place I was, to the place I am again and expect there to be somewhere else to go. I have nowhere to go. And that bothers me. I can’t go anywhere because I’m here, no one will take me in, but I have glittering trinkets to share. Nuggets of wisdom I stole over the years. I have ideas and concepts, some not even written on smeared napkins, and I want to bring them to you. I want to bring them to everyone. I want everything.

When I have everything, I think it would be sobering. I think I’d realize so much of wanting is simply convincing yourself that you need it. When in reality, your life is made much worse through ownership. If I had it, I wouldn’t want it anymore. But that’s not how it works, because I know what it’s like to lose what you have, and if you have things to lose, you want to hold tighter.

But sometimes holding tight, and holding fast, leads to life moving past what you’ve got in your hands, and that’s fine. Because you made the decision to stay where you were. But everyone is moving ahead, and the ones you passed are catching up, and you should be honest with them and try your hand to outpace them all.

But my hands are old. And my mind is sick, sometimes. Today especially. I’ve taken my medicine, but it has done nothing but made me wonder. Through the old halls and lockers where I faced abuse. And now I face it again, alone. No abuser, no one to hold.

It’s just me, and I’m waiting. I’m hoping. And I’m waiting.