Last night the dread weighing my heart down woke me up. It turned into dread that swelled at every thought. My brain seemed to be attacking itself. I thought of Rumplestilskin stomping his foot into the marble flooring of the castle and felt dread. I saw green hills, trees, and fair spring weather and felt dread. Inside my head, the thoughts which are meant to come and go, get snagged on something sharp and unnatural against my skull. Every time I fell asleep I'd wake up again with a racing heart and some awful lingering sensation of discomfort. This phenomenon started with mili-second-long fever dreams in the daylight. Maybe my brain is now protecting me by only safeguarding itself during the day.
I want to peel my skin off and step outside.
I want to open my head and pick out all the impurities.
It's several months later and the symptoms have returned.
Delusions are getting stronger and my obsessions have flourished. I have to drop one for the time being since it's making me afraid of everything, regardless of the shadows growing or sunlight pouring into my room. Every thought, action, glance, or sound may have another side to it--something sinister. I'm afraid I'm going to have a psychotic break and never be able to return to myself, that my mind will dissolve and reassemble itself into something completely different.
Writing about it now is actually terrifying. I've realized that my delusions have always been, even in childhood. What are supposed to be juvenile fantasies about flying, conjuring honest magic, and coming upon talking cats sent to lead you away to a perfect palace in the woods, always curtailed by horrible visions of ghosts, death, and loss.
Right now, as I work on my book about my favorite time and place, I snap out of it and see grossly white lighting that feels completely unnatural. Existence itself feels so grotesque and vile. If I could smell what I feel right this moment, I'd use the words sour, metallic, and festering stench. Sticky, black, viscous, congealed. I can't be the only one who is going through this blasphemous of life itself experience.
My delusions go so far as to predict several, multi-verse futures generated by both hopeful anticipation and unbearable fear. Anxiety has to be the author of both.
What truly set me off this morning was the smell of a homeless person wafting about our office space. I work in an old building on the first floor, in which there are three rooms. My desk is right by the window at the front. In fact the whole from wall is made 95% of clear glass. Everyone walking by can see me. Old women coming to the salon next door to get their hair cut, old men going to get coffee from the cafe up the stairs and around the corner, families, mothers, fathers, children running... Everyone, even Carey, the 70-year-old creep who thought I could enjoy spending any portion of my time with a horrid, wrinkled, old git with a horrible predatory grin. Noah, a forty-something-year-old man with no sense of hygene who happened to have the same idea Carey had. That distinctive scent of a homeless person's body, their skin covered in dirt and sweat. The sadness it brews in me. But this time it's not only sadness but intense fear. Then the wild thoughts being:
What if I forgot to lock the office last night and a strange homeless methhead made a bed on the floor of my co-workers office?
I ought to check but I fear if I see one more terror-inducing sight I might jump off a building.
I am all alone here.
Day after day.
They could jump out and stab me.
Stick me with their needle.
What if it gives me nightmares for the rest of my life?
It literally smells so bad.
Dad only comes in every now and then and when he does, a human to chase at least a small portion of my loneliness away, I am filled with a weird annoyance. The fact that I can no longer write, draw, dilly-dally. It's pathetic. I am a stain on the world and a perfect example of the spoiled white American bitch.
There is so much more. My fiance. My fiance... He has no idea who I really am. I thought I was doing a good job being honest. But then he listened to that recording. I was so horrible. Three years of keeping it together and minding my manners, my opinion, my anger, frustration. GONE. Why do I hide myself from every one. That's all I do is tuck myself away little by little. A piece of me pops out and I tuck it away.
I just pulled out my pepper spray and checked the two other offices. They're empty.
