Glass Walls

A journal-style entry, exploring how a young person may view themselves and how to 'find themselves'. Written on request.

I can’t see them. I can hear their caws. I can feel their claws. I can taste their bile. I can smell their despair. But I can’t see them.

They are always there. Sometimes they’re hidden, sometimes they’re not, but they’re always there. Creeping around in the back of my mind, dragging their dirty paws down my thoughts, tainting them and warping them. They’re like parasites, multiplying when I’m not looking, filling up every last space with their putrid whispering. Always whispering �" in case someone overhears, you see �" whispering in my ear, ripping down my thoughts and giving me new ones. They’re always there.

I would like to think that I’m a pretty solid person. Strength, I suppose, is something people might link to me. Maybe not, who knows. I’m not a mind reader, and if you asked people that, well, you can safely assume that they would lie. No matter how much someone loves you, or you them, they will lie at the best of times. That’s what society means for us human things. Anyway, people might call me strong. I suppose on one hand I am: I’m pretty damn good at acting strong. Thing is, I know better. I know that acting strong is the weakest thing of all. Because I’m not strong. I’m solid. I’m immovable in my weakness. Don’t get me wrong, I know what my weaknesses are (there are many) but that’s about all I’ve got to offer. I’m a walking lie. People think they know me: I assure them that they do. But they don’t. No one actually knows me, because I don’t let them.

I lie a lot. I lie to my parents, to my friends, to everyone. I have practised lies that you could never guess were lies. These lies make up a big part of my life. Without these lies I wouldn’t have a life. Without these lies, I wouldn’t be me. Well, the me that everyone thinks I am. Death, disease, heartbreak. Lies. Why do I lie? No, I’m not a c**t - it’s because I don’t like the truth. Neither would anyone else. I don’t even understand the truth. So how could anyone else? I don’t know what I am. I don’t know who I am. But people don’t get that, they expect you to know who you are, because surely that’s one thing that every individual should be good at? Knowing who you are? Well, I don’t, so I make it up. It seems to have worked so far. I don’t like it though �" used to. But I don’t. I want to start my life over without these lies. Thing is, people don’t know this, so they won’t leave me alone to wallow in my truth, they force these lies down my throat. My own lies. I can’t escape them. I wish to.

The only way I could escape is to bleed from the outside, but that’s messy and I’m awfully afraid of dying. I’ve always been an indecisive person: it can take me ages to figure out what I want to have for dinner, or what flavour ice cream to have. Imagine having to make the decision whether to live or die? Well, I can. I’ve made that decision a lot these past few years. Obviously you know what the decision has been. I’m just hoping (wary) that it will change.

I can’t see them, but I can hear them, smell them, taste them. They’re always there, trying to bring down these glass walls that I’ve built. I’ve built them strong, so infallible that no one can see past them. They can only see the warped, obscure shapes through the glass, and take that to be me. I manipulate these shapes by throwing facial expressions at them, expressions that I don’t wish to make. Smiling, laughing, shaking my head and saying yes I was okay. Everyone falls for that one. Even when they don’t, they pretend to. They have walls of their own to keep up; if you don’t pretend to fall for it, they tell themselves, then you might bring down their walls, which might bring down your own. No, too dangerous. Best to just pretend.

These things in my head hurt me. Hurt me more than the razor blades against my skin, the scissors on my thighs and the impact of my fists on my ribcage. Hurt me more than I thought things could hurt. They’re like insects burrowing into the grey mass of my self-loathing, never letting me forget the hatred I have for myself.

I don’t know where this hatred ever came from, you know. I look back on my childhood and only remember being petty, and happy, and hungry and loud and a child. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then I realised how much I was a human being, a teenage girl, a horrible warped beast of a living thing, and I started to hate. This hate grew into loathing and tears and two tries of suicide and I can no longer see a way out. This labyrinth of scuttling insecurity with its glass walls has got me trapped, and no matter how much I bang my fists against my walls, they never seem to come down. My own inner defences have turned into my own Rapunzel’s Tower, leaving me trapped and alone with only these things inside my head as friends.

So what’s my next move? I don’t know. Life or death? What is either? What is more than just existing? What is more than pretending to be okay? Pretending to be okay so often that you forget that you’re even pretending? Then when you remember, it feels like the floor has been taken out from underneath you, and you’re just going to free fall into you remember how to pretend again? Thinking you are so happy, then listening to that one song by chance and realising that you don’t know what happy is? Looking at photos of the people you wish you were? Hearing others discuss their perfect future plans and thinking that you can’t even imagine living past the next year because you made a pact with yourself that if you weren’t beautiful and thin and happy by then, then you would take a bottle of pills and sleep forever? Thinking that immortality is the same as never having to wake up? A true death is a true sleep? Seeing the sun in the morning and having that flash of ‘why?’ flood your mind? Knowing that school is just a social hell? What is more than that? Is there more? I have to believe that is more than that, past these glass walls, otherwise suicide will be just another word for living.

Maybe one day I will step out into the sun, open the gate from this fairytale tower and throw away the key, so that it can never be locked again. Maybe one day I will see razors and scissors and knives as what they are, and not ways to make my skin turn red. Maybe one day I will see that these glass walls aren’t really glass, but ice, and if I stay out of the cold for long enough, then maybe they will melt.

Maybe one day I will see them.

Author's Note

Not really intended to have any true catharsis or purpose, purely acting as a journal entry.

Reviews

[Marie Harrison]

Wow, what a journey you took us on.
Wonderful work of self!

[blakjassy]

i like the journey that you take the reader on and the fact that you end it with a hope for the future.

If you get the chance you may like to check out the writing of another writer on here, Jeremy Baker, I think his dark style may appeal to you!