From a tired assumption you made a previous day, your whole voice breaks as you begin to say the words you’ve been meaning to – but nevertheless putting off time after time again. You had been told that solitude was going to be more pleasant than this.
You sit there with your legs tucked up close to your chest and all you can think about is a warm hand holding yours, and you just for a moment believe it’s really there and not a figment of your imagination.
The warm touch of the hand runs a shiver through your spine and you long to have the fleeting presence just for a small period. A time when you can really feel it, and understand what it is you’re feeling, what it is you’re holding out for.
After all, isn’t this all you’ve wanted up until now? But you’ve been trying so hard not to let it happen that you forgot how to just relax and leave things to move at their own pace. What exactly is it that you’re waiting for?
A recollection of a previous bad memory may churn in your head, and all you can hear are the echoes of nightmares spinning around your prefrontal cortex, and you sit there and think to yourself whether it will all be worth it in the end.
It’s not that you don’t want it to work, because you want more than ever for things to fall into place for once, to make your path less twisted and narrower. You want to be able to reach out to either side and no what’s there rather than having this endless cave of blackness surrounding your sitting in solitude.
While you let your legs drop to the floor and you sit up right, you feel a sense of panic as you’re in an openness you’ve not yet encountered. You’re bare and left vulnerable, with nothing to hide your naked body. But your hair covering your face shows your nervousness and hands fumbling together as you begin to stand.
Your legs feel like you’re learning to walk for the very first time, and as you take each step you take a breath in and out and remember how easy it is just to live – just to walk around in your day as if nothing had happened.
The feeling may suddenly pass you in a minute or two, but for now you are free and you can do as you wish, with your legs no longer held to your chest you can bare your flesh to the world and walk in your own skin. You’re no longer left hiding, because you have nothing to hide.
A small tear runs down your cheek, but at the same time you smile because you remember for the first time in a long while it’s for happiness and not for a darkened thought to that’s blurry at the edges. So you realise now that this is where you are, and most of all this is where you want to be. This is who you want to be, and you don’t want to be kept locked up anymore because it’s too hard to handle.
The feeling of enclosure is no longer holding you back and as you walk further forward you realise you can decide which way you walk, you don’t have to turn left or right and backwards, but now you can walk forwards too. And you can keep going. Nothing is stopping you and you have no harness or handcuffs to keep you imprisoned anymore, because you can finally scream your lungs out so hard that you’re not trapped.
You’re not trapped in this small cocoon that you made for yourself, and all that you needed to break free was the knowledge of freedom in itself, and the knowledge that you’re a person with whatever actions you want to do, whatever movement you want to make – you can do this now. You’re not shackled in a room, you’re not feeling so isolated that all you can think about it a spray of blood rushing from your arm and you no longer care about the distant stares if the wanderers in the street…
*************
So you thought you could be free didn’t you? You thought that the pain you were feeling was going to vanish, it wasn’t going to press down on your heart and make it harder for you anymore. Well you’re wrong, because you can’t break free. And you can’t be who you want to be.
Because sometimes it doesn’t matter to you that you’re closing yourself off from opportunity, and sometimes you just want to cling onto the darkness, you don’t want to see the sun shining on the trees and the happy faces on the people walking by. So you choose to do this instead.
But when you open your eyes and you look around and gaze at everything and everyone around, it’s possible that maybe for once you’re right? Or is this not true. Can it not be said that sometimes what you’re thinking isn’t truly how you feel. Your mind is playing tricks on you.
The sound of the rain on the window tapping down and dripping down and down, is a waste of time and waste of your hearing. So you turn on the music in hope you find some enduring emotion you can sing along to. But the rain is too distracting, it’s always there in the background like a never ending clock that just won’t stop.
Your mind just concentrates on the little noises in the background, and your main focus is all over the place. What can you do to get out of the trap? Nothing. You have to sit there, and you have to hold your body close because if you don’t something will happen.
It doesn’t matter what you think will happen, but if you show yourself naked to the world then that’s the end. The end of it all – or what you think in your head. Is it really the end? If you close your eyes again for a minute now you might open them and realise you can break out.
You close your eyes and you feel worse, there’s a dizzying sense of panic and you feel your mind racing with thought after thought of being in a small elevator or trapped inside your own body not being able to move, and you know at once that you need to open your eyes. It was a bad idea to close them, but it’s not like you didn’t listen and try.
So you tried.
© Amara Hope Melechi
amarahopemelechi 