Soap

Bewusstsein

Bewusstsein (noun. german)

The knowledge of somethings existence and acknowledgment of oneself. Awareness.

Sometimes I lay awake at night.
Everybody does from time to time. But lately it has become a habit of mine to just not be able to fall asleep.

And when that happens I start to become awfully aware of myself and that makes me sick.
Not in the way you might think.

I don't torture myself with bad thoughts about my body. About my future and my past. About my feelings or the lack of them.

No, what I become aware of are the hard facts.

I am suddenly aware of my breathing.
The in and out of air through my mouth and the seemingly endless tube people call trachea.
I always think of it as a metal pipe. I guess the thought of a fleshy tube right inside of my throat scares me a little.
Then again... a metal tube would be very inconvenient.

But that's not the point.
I start picturing my lungs. Flappy bags when empty and floating balloons when full.
I can almost feel them pressing my chest up and down.
And then I imagine what it would be like if we could just breathe in until our lungs exploded.
Would they even explode? Or would the fill endlessly until there was no more room left inside of us?
I like to picture the wet, dark flesh pushing through the space between the ribs and pressing against the sternum.
How long would it take for it to crack?

And then i feel the blood. All the different cells rushing through my body.
I once tried to give them names but I'm sure there aren't enough names on this planet for all of my blood cells.
The red and the white ones.
That's enough namegiving for now.
I usually have to lay on my back with my arms and legs stretched our on my sides to really feel the pressure in my veins as the cells push against each other.
I like to picture them as little creatures with a teeny tiny voice, screaming at each other to get out of the way. Wouldn't that be fun?

And I hear them. Every time I yawn and hear the rumbling in my ears I am sure it's my tiny blood-cell-creatures trying to talk to me.

Unfortunately I don't understand their language...

But they all have the same destination:
My heart.
It must be like a fun water... well... blood park for my little creatures. Going up a slide - the heart - and then sliding down through different tubes, being sent in different directions inside of my body.

There it is again - the tubes. The pipes.
And sometimes, when you're very unlucky, there are a few naughty blood cells that all want to slide at the same time and block it. And the more blood-cell-creatures try to fix the problem, the worse it gets.
And then you die.
Apparently.

Though I'm not sure how often the body is able to fix that problem without me noticing.

Once I saw a clip on late-night-television about open-heart surgery and there they showed the inside of a man's chest.
And I saw the mans heart pumping like mad.
Really, the way the heart moved seemed almost aggressively strong and though it gave me anxiety,  knowing that it moved just like that inside my own body, it made me believe that this kind of strength could deal with the naughtiest of blood-cell-creatures.

My skin itches when I think about it.

I wonder how an itch works.

I know that things on the outside of the body can tickle my skin, thus making it itch.

No, I wonder about the itches on the inside.
You know... when you feel like there's something underneath the skin on the inside of your palm and you scratch it but it won't help because the itch is right underneath the surface where you can't reach it.
Or when the back of your throat starts tingling and neither coughing nor clearing your throat helps.

I tried pushing my fingers all the way back to scratch it at first but that made me sick.
I don't really have that much of a gag-reflex but once I touch my suppository my eyes tear up and I'm close to throwing up.

Another itch I couldn't scratch.

I wonder if my little blood-cell-creatures have anything to do with it.
Maybe they swim around holding feathers to the tubes to get on my nerves.
Again, some of them are the worst.

Of course I could just google it but what's the point?
Maybe it would satisfy my need for answers but it would also take all the magic away.
Or at least I think so.

I hold my breath.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
Fifty seconds.
Seventy s-...
I breathe in.

I'm not an athlete and I am a smoker. Not ideal for my lungs and not ideal for my ability to hold my breath.
Still I try to challenge myself every time.
Hold it, until my lungs start to flutter.

And I only breathe in when they start burning and every blood-cell-creature screams in my ears to finally let go.
So I do.
And it feels magical.

Just as magical as it feels to make my heart stop.
Yeah, I can do that.
At least sometimes.
And only for one beat.

That's one thing I've researched and apparently many people can or could do that. At least if they tried.

It made me very uncomfortable at first but after a while it gave me a certain... kick.

When I lay very still just like I do to feel the blood-cell-creatures, I start concentrating on the beat of my heart.
And after a while I can feel my whole body pulsating to my inner rhythm. My arms and legs twitch from time to time when one of the electric signals my brain sent out goes to the wrong nerve but that doesn't bother me. I like that feeling.

And then I hold my breath again. Not too long as to make my lungs burn but just long enough to feel the hunger for air. And then I focus on my heart again. I count the beats and then I breathe out what is left in my lungs.
For some reason this is what makes my heart skip a beat. Or at least I think so.

It makes my whole body shiver sometimes.

You're probably wondering why I tell you all of this.
It might not be important to you.
It might also not be important to what was about to happen.

But I'd like to think that this is where it all started.
Of course I could go way back.
I could start on the day my mother founded her own cleaning company.
Or the day I lost my job.
Or even the shameful day I moved back home to my parents when I wasn't able to afford my NewYorker apartment anymore.

All of those events led to the point of no return.
But none of them started it.

No, everything started the night I was laying in my bed wide awake.
My night of awareness.

The night that led me right into the core of the tornado that Frank Iero would turn out to be.

Or at least I think so.