Maze

It’s easier to think about my brain as a separate entity. She is mysterious and volatile and brilliant and flawed. She needs to be managed, and also freed. I feel around her folds to try and find what makes her happy, what she wants. And often I find my hands empty, my fingers tainted with feelings and thoughts that I cannot control or understand. They taste like ink, and I do not have a pen. I smear her colors over the door, the mirror, the window. I drop her into a candle flame and look for answers in the smoke. She has adapted to years of never wanting, never needing, and now in this mess of reality she has no direction. I offer up new hobbies, new people, new things and she is capable of being fascinated. But inevitably, she retreats into a corner of comfort, a sedative to defend from knowing that she cannot have everything she wants, and she wants the world.

She lives through the lives of characters on a screen, searching for a template she will never find. She longs for omniscience but is scared of mirrors. For her, days pass slowly and tediously, but she cannot remember the past month, the last year. There is so much she cannot understand. So I try to instead. I untangle the messes she leaves behind, unlock the guarded thoughts, leave her be while she hibernates and dreams, hoping that when she wakes up she will be different and better. She won’t. But she also won’t recognize the words I made with the ink she gave me. She will be scared of the change and then desire it all the more. She is contradictory and confused and cowardly. I love her anyway. I do not have a choice.

This is the only way that I know how to be selfish. And for now it works. I play the songs that please her and stop them in the middle when they get too loud. I watch the shows she has already seen, two times, ten times over with minesweeper on the phone so she does not have to hear herself think. Everything with her is a bargain. If she doesn’t procrastinate she can have a dessert. If she goes for a run she can watch another episode. She does not have logic. She does not realize that all of this is for her. She is just a child even though I am not. Today I did not break my brain. If anything I think I healed a bit of what I broke last time. Every time I do this, I feel three years older. But today was particularly beautiful. I listened to music and watched Grey’s Anatomy and did some work. Very little work. I looked around at my apartment. I looked at myself in the mirror. Somehow, for a moment I knew everything would be okay.

That moment has since passed. Her psyche is always in flux. There is no such thing as constant but it’s the only thing that she’s really chasing. Before, she was bold and brave and strong. Now, she is tired and scared and sad. The paradigm shifts and the walls have moved, the doors have closed, thoughts compounded by fear compounded by time. The shows that soothed her two hours ago no longer do. The beautiful blue of her room no longer is. She backtracks further and further in search of something safe. She thinks maybe if she makes it to the beginning she can unravel this mess. Figure out where the end is supposed to be. But she doesn’t see that she is going nowhere, that it all moves with her. I do. I look forward and see the turns and choices she refuses to make. I see the next month she won’t remember, the next job she’d avoid, the next friend she will never meet. And I know why she is afraid. Because in this long, long line of nexts, there is no place to rest. And there is only one exit.