Fly

What you are is not something you can explain, but you try anyway. Five moments.

(1)

You turn the music up until your ears hurt, until your head pounds, until the thump thump thump of your heart is lost in the thump thump thump of the bass and you forget you’re real.

(2)

In the mirror, your eyes look too glassy, your pupils too dilated. You can hear the thump thump thump of your heart pounding away in your chest, in your ears. Your reflection stands up tall, too tall, and suddenly you’re a toddler again, looking up at everything so big. So grown up. Now, you’re so far above the ground and you want to go back to being small, so small. Now, the colours look over-saturated, but not in a curious, child-like way.

Your reflection turns to look at its side. Watercolour bruises paint your ribs, your hips, your stomach. Ink-like blood drips down, down, down. Your canvas is cracking.

 

(3)

Sometimes you think you are a cork board. People leave messages pinned to you and by now you are so full of other people’s contradicting words that you’re not sure which to believe.

Too thin.

Too fat.

Too tall.

Too short.

Too loud.

Too quiet.

 

Sometimes you think that they are all right and you are all wrong. Maybe you are made out of too many different parts instead of uniform ones, and you should be disassembled and blown away by the wind.

 

(4)

You had a dream once where you were flying. Above and left and right of you were clouds and night sky for miles, but as soon as you tried to look down, you were falling.

You land in the ocean. You can’t feel the wetness sliding over your skin and through your hair, but you feel the weight of the water pressing arctic cold against your lungs. You don’t try to breathe but you know you don’t need to. As you sink, all you can think is how pretty everything looks in the blueblackgreen of the water.

(5)

It's not that you like words or paintings or music, you just like losing yourself in something. Losing yourself seems  an awful concept if it's out in the grey space that is your mind, but once you're contained in something, it's alright. You like trying to see what the artist first saw in their head. You like to wonder if maybe it's like yours, all grey space and flying and blueblackgreen oceans. Then you see happy stories and paintings, and hear love songs, and you think maybe it's a little different.