My brain is rotting in confinement

About six weeks ago I badly injured my back and have been forced to spend almost all of my time in bed, as even sitting for extended periods of time is untenable. Physical therapy starts soon. I’m lucky nothing is broken, and that the damage will heal. For now, though, the isolation and near constant pain is frustrating and has tinted the kinds of creative projects I’ve been working on. I thought I’d share with you a journal entry from a week ago, while I tried to work out a new narrative style. It needs work.

“The trees here keep to themselves; I tried to lie against one but it refused me, fluttering its limbs in such a manner that I was sure it wanted me to move elsewhere. During the daytime I prefer to hide inside. Eventually the day recedes and I emerge to a cleaner, darker environment. The stars are suffocated by pollution from the city, but the sunsets rage beautifully because of it.

I pretend to taste the smog in my teeth and lungs. It fills me, and I become an instrument in the pseudo-industrial orchestra. Buttoned up, buttoned down, I stroll the sidewalks in a straight laced jacket. My rhythmic steps beat the streets to my circadian soundtrack as my internal clock flashes twelve o’clock; I don’t bother to reset it. My mind wanders inside itself: my perceptions are selfish, my concepts subjective and amorphous. My polluted neuroses mirror the rivers that fail to return my reflection.

I see myself from above. I sit on the roofs of the neighboring houses and watch myself sit in the alleyway, confronting the houses about their issues with individuality and listening fiercely for their replies. Their business is my business, since I have no business of my own. I watch, I listen. I suppress the urge to intimidate them into changing their ways. They stand, full of bricks and wood.

Unfortunately, houses don’t have eyes to stare into. I can’t see their souls in their pupils, their insecurities in their irises. There are no eyes to betray fear, vulnerability, corruptibility. Though they may not truly be, these subjects appear stalwart.

The moon appears in my alley between three and four in the morning. I’ve never known a moon like this one; when it appears to me in this place it sees through me. I feel it burning through my chest, rooting around to find that muscle pumping oil through my aluminum veins. My fingers curl and twist when it finds its way to my eyes and sees into my mind, sees the things I can’t see myself. This is the only time my tongue trips over my teeth; I can’t bring myself to ask what the great white orb of the sky sees in me. After all, its opinion is the only one I care for. Unbiased, representative of the true environment, but I fear its scorn. The moon knows when I’m broken or changing. It sees what I do, knows what I think, what I want, my angle, my needs, my shortcomings and compensations. It has no master, and I fear it.

It rains here. The people stay inside, the birds stop flying and hole up under cover; traffic becomes sparse and the sky closes up. Some things emerge, though. Umbrellas unfurl. The oil in the gravel seeps out. And I sit on the side of the road, staring at reflections of streetlights in the pavement. Rubber tires make a ‘galosh’ sound when they stream through water and hydroplane. I replay the sound for myself in my head; galosh, galossh, galossshh. The water spills from the road as the treads on the tires force it out to the side. I walk at the peak of the wake made by the water sliding off the curving road; I look at the reflections at my sides, and walk by trusting my feet.”

I want this to be better. I want my body to heal. I want the things that I make to make me feel proud. I want to take risks that make me feel something new. Soon I’ll take back my life and make it work for me, surely.