Fragments

I live in a world of lyrics.

Conversations. People speak, and a word, a phrase, some key unlocks the memory in my mind, and the sentence finishes in my mind with the song. Thoughts are fleeting, touches of memory interlaced with present (or is it the other way 'round?).

... just follow your eyes... just follow your eyes...

They say I'm haunted. I say everyone is, I just don't bother hiding it. The voices in my head won't shut up. You have them too, I can see it in your eyes. They whisper to you in the darkness, your self doubts, your sins, your rage telling you to just... let... go...

I get into the car, iPod on, and hit random. Boys of Summer. Clear as crystal, the association ignites a fire of thought. (Your face is always there... [never forget...]) Immediately, I pass some unfortunate creature on the side of the road (this time it's a possum) and the scent of death hits my senses. It's sharp, but old. I know the scent of dead things. It's the blood that does it - a cadaver without blood is mostly dry and barely carries a scent at all. No, it's the blood. (... he had no blood left when I saw him... none of them did [they did that on purpose.])

The faces come unbidden, the words unwanted. The Litany remains in blood and tears, even though I tried to put it down. Bricks. So many bricks in a giant burlap sack that I carry like a cross down an old dusty road. But I hide it, see? Nobody wants to see what's in the bag. Everyone has a bag. Some big. Some small. Everyone hides it. If you don't, you're a "complainer" or "just looking for attention". Sure, some people wear their suffering on their sleeve like they're a martyr. But then the ones with legitimate pain can't come forward, for fear of being branded. Mine? Mine is survivor's guilt. I know it well. It's an old friend, like that neighbor that keeps borrowing your things and then never giving them back. I don't like it much, and it keeps reciting the Litany to me, but it's a part of my life. I put on a nice smile and deal with it. It's either that or fight it, and fighting it accomplished nothing.

What's the Litany?

... what if everything around you... isn't quite what it seems... 

The names of the dead. The faces. The ages. How they died. The story. (... the story [a man is never truly dead...]) I heard once that a man is never truly dead until he is forgotten. I remember. I feel like I have to. Like someone must. That if I bear witness, they won't really be dead. Not really. Not gone. Not entirely. (These burdens aren't MINE! [stop fighting it, struggling makes it worse] It's not fair!) I tried to put it down. But it's a scar. You can't put scars down. They'll heal over, you can nurse them until they get better, but they never really go entirely away.

...what if all the world you think you know... is an elaborate dream...

I think the hardest job in the world has to be a military doctor. I used to think it was being an ER doc, dealing with the absolute worst of humanity in the most feral state of pain, bleeding, dying, pus and vomit and bile and insides on the outside. Bones poking through the skin. And at the same time, half the people are crazed, drugged, just insane - and may try to actually hurt you. The stories. The stories make my hair stand on end. THIS is humanity? Then I thought being a soldier was worse, being far from home and under fire, far from help, watching your friend die beside you from a gut shot. But what about the field docs? The ones handling both the screaming bloody death and the gunfire?

How do you survive that?

Ever stop to think about how difficult it is for a doctor to tell a mother her child's dead, or a husband his wife was DOA? And it's somehow their fault, for not trying hard enough to save them, for being incompetent, they get the blame... but they're human. They don't want the patient to die. They don't give up just because it's too hard. And then they get blamed. Can you imagine that? How do you wake up the next day and go into the same damn room the next damn day (all cleaned up, of course [the blood washes away, but not the memory]) with a new smiling patient with stomach cramps.... every day, you keep getting up and going back... over and over... and over... (to repeat the same steps [and expect different results] is madness...)

Madness is tempting.

... wish I was too dead to cry... 

I've brushed it. Tasted it. The dance down that path is dark and close; it seems comforting enough at first (how hard could it really be? [it's so much easier to just let go... let go...])... easier, lighter. That's how it captures you. But too far and it becomes hell. You're no longer in control. What you're saying comes out differently than what you thought. Soon you question reality. Sleep and wakefulness blur, nightmares follow you into daylight. No. Madness is not easier. But once it sinks its claws in... (I want out! [stay with us, precious one... you cannot leave] LET ME OUT!)

...wish I was too dead to care... if indeed I cared at all...

But that is not here. Neither here nor there. Yet everywhere. They say I am haunted. My thoughts are fleeting and indistinct, more peripheral glimpses of sensory perception than actually fully-formed beings of their own right. I write, and they manifest. I float from one to the next.

I hit the treeline. A Forest, by The Cure. A particular mix. Instant recognition. Faces. Scents. I live in a world of senses, like I live in a world of lyrics. I taste the words, I feel the sounds. Sights invoke a scent. Criscrossed like so much wiring gone awry to make strangely beautiful music. The melody hums in my ears as I focus on harmony, I catch what others don't. The deer in the pasture. The hawk in the tree. The fish in the stream. "Good eye," they say. But it wasn't my faulty eyes that caught it. I heard the heartbeat through the ground. I smelled it before I saw it. Except motion. I'm all instinct then. Motion - just a flash from the corner of my eye - and I've caught a snake in my hands. (not terribly smart [just a racer snake]... what if it had been a rattler?) Emotions mix with music like water and wine and I'm near to tears. They've started to not ask why.

... mad world...

But you'll read this and think I'm crazy, or sad, or angry. Depressed, a danger to myself. None of these things are true.

Every day a thousand thoughts run in rapid succession through my distracted mind. Triggered by a thousand little associations, linked irrevocably to the faces of loved ones and times gone by, I cannot help it. A river is full of water it gains from a thousand little rivulets, as I am full of memories from a thousand little events. Each one carries with it the scents and emotions and thoughts and fears and melodies from a million seconds I can't recall with any clarity but come rushing back where the river meets the sea.

This world that I live in, the world of lyrics, the world of senses, the world where thoughts emotions collide as violently yet beautifully as galaxies crossing paths... they tell me no one else sees this world like I do. ("That's one of the reasons I like hanging out with you".) My perspective may be through a stain glass window, but sometimes the colors bleed together and become a mosaic of beauty where others only see the broken glass.

... I'd like to make myself believe that planet Earth turns slowly...

Perhaps you think I AM mad. But I know better. Only those who have gotten lost and found the path back know what it looks like. Sounds overproud, maybe? True. Some have travelled much further down the path, seen things I haven't, known horrors I can't even imagine. But they know I am not mad. Haunted, yes. But not mad. (The voices are real [you have them too] I'm not imagining this [you never were] but that's okay, they're my friends [with friends like that...]) And the inspiring thing is that someone ordinary, like myself, can GET lost, and MAKE it back alive, covered in thorns and burrs and scratches and dirt, but knowing the way out of the dark hole they fell into. Because now not only will they not fall in again, they can help others out of it, too.

... by the hallways in this dining-room, the echo there of me and you, the voices that are carrying this tune...

So when we speak, and my eyes skirt the edges of the room, if I mutter a strange phrase under my breath far removed from my normal way of speaking, if we're out in the sunlight and I stare at something overlong, if I talk to an inanimate object like an injured child or greet some strange little animal like a friend, it's not because I'm insane. It's because I'm dancing through the thoughts in my head, trying to see the world around the filters, hearing a constant stream of music accompanying me even as I try to listen to what you're saying. I'm trying to recall the memories without associating them with your face (the faces always come unbidden) and trying not to see the look of shock when I blurt out something I probably ought not to have said aloud.

... I want to exorcise the demons from your past...

I'll be okay, I promise. I've made it this far. A seed, planted in a crevasse, will be battered by the elements, starve for nutrients, yet manage to eke out enough to survive. My cliff wasn't as steep as some, my crevasse wider than some, the wind perhaps not as persistent. Yet challenges came, and I surmounted them, many and more and those coming I face down with teeth bared. The tree that takes root and survives becomes a bonsai, twisted by the elements into something other than its intended shape, but beautiful nonetheless, hardy, persistent in its own right. I am tenacious, capricious, and nothing if not absolutely resilient.

I live in a world that is not like yours. But yet I live in your world.

Be patient with me.

Nightmares come, but the morning always follows.

... it's hard to say that I'd rather stay awake when I'm asleep, because my dreams are bursting at the seams.

(You think I'll cry? I won't cry. My heart will break before I cry...)

(... I will go MAD.)

... Tilt your head back, and howl.