Only My Own

Gray sky elicits grayer clouds as Clara slides her foot around the cast iron café table leg.  Chill creeping through the knobby bone of her ankle distracts from absence of feeling, but only for a perishable moment.  Darting eyes avoid glances, as she double taps her cigarette pack in search of deathly relaxation.  The sweet tarry smell flings itself up to her nostrils, smooth paper in hand, and the scratch metal heat of the lighter clicks and sparks.  Inhalation. Then nothing but her own thoughts.

Brushing a few maple-gold leaves of tobacco off of the table-top she ponders why she emerged from the plushy lush coffin of her bed to sit outdoors, alone, outside an overpriced, overrated café.  As with everything in life, no answers, just shrugs.  The air is cool enough that the coffee half-filling the beige-stained garbage ceramic mug is already half-chilled, its delightful burn now a mouth-twisting lukewarm.  The thoughts travel nowhere, yet at their core beg to rush and push, much like cars halted under the fading sun of a Los Angeles traffic jam.  One day the thoughts might crash into one another, and she will fold into herself forever.  Who knows when; the mind can only handle so much.

Happy mother and daughter bustle past, chirruping with syrupy giggles of a carefree life she could never have known.  It always seems that way from the outside, doesn’t it?  The little girl is predictably dressed in pink, as if she has no choice in the matter, and her world is likely a gaudy pink myriad of Barbie-dolls and unicorns.  As a child, Clara scowled at Barbies, and would cut their hair into ill-thought-out punk styles, until she chucked them in the closet one day for good, and unicorns, as we all know, don’t exist. It often felt like the only thing that ever existed was her own mind: which was one thing she truly wished didn’t exist at all. 

How does one relate to others when one’s life had been torn to shreds before it even started?  The mental distress that now plagued Clara had ravaged her mother, sending her into medicated spirals of numbed-out prozac and hollow-eyed lithium, pills for pits of despair that never vanished, were not quite managed, and that still spun under the gauzy mask of chemical alteration; ativan to avoid altercations, xanax for panic-attacks, and cocktails of Z-drugs to sleep away days and nights unasked for.  Then mom just disappeared one day; and dad found a Barbie of his own, and Clara was left with a haunted unmarried aunt that drank half a bottle of gin nightly. 

Freedom in a sense.  When no one looks after you, you grow up quickly.  Leaving ‘home’ at sixteen, her only friend pierced her nose with a safety pin and she realized no human could ever pin her down again.  There’s a fierceness to freedom, and it usually only comes in glimpses and glances, but when life itself constantly restrains you, you refrain from being tied down by any other humans, and live only for yourself.  Sometimes, however, our hearts and minds have other plans.  The nausea of her own thoughts began to chase her, and she knew her mother’s mind was genetically imbedded, as fragments of pain began covering her brain like delicate layers of dust.  You can try to escape the world and everyone else, but you can never escape yourself. 

Soon the pain permeated everything.  A haphazardly scribbled letter from her gin-drenched aunt confirmed, after decades of depression, her mother had found her way into the white-walled sterile prison of a mental ‘health’ institution   Not impervious to her own mother’s suffering, she shed tears, but realized more tears fell for herself.  Destiny seemed to be chasing her, as dry mouth paper cups brimming with psychiatric medications and assailing asylums loomed in her forlorn future.

The future, however, isn’t the current moment, even if time continually tumbles into itself.  Crumbling foundation or not, she fell in love with a boy whose mouth drew her in.  The daredevil curve of his lip was enough, and the fact he made her laugh about her brokenness appealed.  Outrageous rampages on rum and white lines fueled them nightly with unearthly ecstasy, and days spent in his dusty darkened bachelor suite, blinds only welcoming sleek slits of sunlight, made such sloth seem glamorous.  They talked for hours, dark circles under his eyes heavy like smoke, the hollows of his malnourished cheeks cutting shadowed alleys into his pallid flesh. 

“Why was anyone ever born?” He asked.

“It’s all just pointlessness.”

“I think it’s to suffer; life itself is punishment.”

“Shut up and light me a cigarette, you’re even more morose than I am.” Clara threw her head back and laughed.

But romance dulled and he drifted into illness as he fell in love with whatever could be injected and cooked up in a black, burnt, bent spoon.  Time to move on. Unable to pay rent, she stayed with friends who weren’t really friends, but other fragmented stragglers struggling to exist through varying stages of decay and disenchantment.  Finally, she found dismal part-time jobs clicking keys at cash registers, stuffing money into the pockets of arrogant corporations, but never her own.  Bagging and scanning left her plummeting mind to ponder all day, and dragging herself out of bed into doldrums’ drudgery became more punishingly pointless than ever.

And now…she sits outside this café, a chain-smoking statute of stagnated solitude, her twenties closing in around her, still nowhere in the fabled somewhere of life.  Perusing such details of an unwanted existence, she barely realized she’d twisted a paper napkin between her fingers to flimsy shreds.  The harsh realism of insipid conversational snippets slowly pours back towards her senses, as fellow patrons and ceramic clinks rear their way back into consciousness.  A woman with cascading black curls and a time-etched face approaches Clara, drops a paper napkin on the table, and slinks away as quickly as she had appeared. Strange, but when one succumbs to certain levels of numbness, surprise seems less surreal, and is more akin to a hollow bump.

Scrawled in heavy black script on the napkin, one word: “CHANNEL.”

Clara knew what it meant.  Thoughts needed to be exorcised onto paper, channeled out of her churning head.  So transparently lost in her own thoughts, semi-perceptive others were entirely aware of this struggle, even though others, so allegedly full of human warmth and compassion, had repeatedly strayed away, or simply stayed away from the start.  A perpetual chain of unending pain.  But words and thoughts, they would always be her own, and escapism’s pure truth could only be found through the written word. 

I feel disposable and it’s both agonizing and liberating.

I am alone.

I am only my own.