The Mind is a Frightening Place

A Story by tazwrites

“Open it,” he says. Only after I'm falling do I realize I never heard the man’s voice. Was it gravely? Was it angry? (I promise I am fine)

He holds a gun to my head. “Open it,” he says.

Open it, I understand. I must. His face is bunched in anger. The man will not one to hesitate. His hand clenches the gun handle tightly, as if he is afraid to drop it. I think of how slippery it must be for him, sweat coating the metal. For a second, I feel pity.

I open the chest in front of me and see the darkness swirling. A black hole. It sucks me in before I can process how there is no bottom. How I never heard the man’s voice. Was it gravely? Was it angry? Was I not staring at the box the whole time? How did I see his face?

What did he look like?

The mind is a frightening place.

I grasp the corner of the staircase, looking at the steps with hesitation. My mind tells me I have traversed these stairs multiple times in my childhood, bounding up with excitement, crawling backward with my neighbor in effort to create a fairer race. She had pins and needles in one leg. I remember touching them with fascination, hand trailing over the soft end, knowing that the painful side was buried deep in her skin.

I take a step. There is nothing to fear. I am an able-bodied woman.

When I let go of the staircase and take another step, my leg folds under me and I collapse. I look up and open my eyes to the burnt brown of my university library, the first time I realized the limitations of my body.

What is happening to me?

I beg my parents to seek help. I cry, day and night, explaining that I cannot stop thinking of how I want to escape.

“This body,” I sob, “has entrapped me. I want to wander. I want to run, I want to live, I want to feel the soft dirt of the ground I am buried in.”

The latter will never happen. Muslim burial requires the body be wrapped in cloth before buried. Christian burial entraps the body in a coffin, far from the earth’s elements.

My resting place, should I follow through with my plans, would land my family no choice but to cremate me. I would be ashes, left to the wind, mingling with the trash and the smoke in the atmosphere.

Not the dirt I crave. Would my parents pack me into the dirt if I asked them to?

They take me to therapy instead. “Help her,” they gesture aggressively, the way brown parents tend to when they get worried. “She has driven us up the wall, despite our efforts. Help her.”

I laugh. Efforts that included sweeping the incidents under the rug, telling me my behavior was inappropriate, threatening me to stop? “I do not need help,” I smile, but my mother pushes me back into the chair, frowning.

“You brought us here.”

I will hear that line, multiple times, when my parents pour over bills, when they argue with the provider over charges. I tell them I am ready to quit. There is no hope for me. The struggle is mine, and every time I ask for help, it is like miming to a blind person. We cannot communicate.

I receive no sympathy from my father. He is content to pay, now, but he will not talk to me about my condition. We both agree it is all in my head. I tell him that if I remain headstrong enough, I will recover.

“Give me four years. You gave your oldest son many more. Give me college. Give me four years.”

My mother’s anger softens to worry. I have won sympathy from her. I am such a manipulator. When I know anger will come from the woman I should be protecting, I turn it into pity for me. Look how I’m struggling, I say, holding out the handcuffs on my wrists, but I refuse to loosen the chains that tie her to the brick wall.

“Present a plan to me,” she caves, “a solid plan to recover, and I will let you have as much time as you want.”

My plan is to run myself so ragged that the world and I complete each other in four years. I do not tell her this.

“Okay,” I nod, and never draft a plan. I am a manipulator, but I am not a liar.

“Respect your parents, and God will repay you.” My parents listen with tears in their eyes, whispering loudly about sons and daughters who have followed their parents’ wishes and are living picturesque lives while the rest of us struggle. Often I am desperate and refuse to face my emotions. “Take them,” I thrust on my mother, “take it all.” She analyzes my emotions, picking up the unrest that courses through my skin, smiling at the anxiety I share with her, tutting disapprovingly at my disbelief.

“If only you followed what we told you.” She says, after wasting hours arguing with me. “You would never end up here.”

She leaves and I laugh. “Take your God with you,” I say bitterly, knowing that she will turn and pray to Him tonight while I cry alone. She never tells me that He is mine to pray to, too. I can sob to him, and he will listen to me.

But I have prayed. And I am still where I am.

The demon in the corner laughs.

I know I am in the wrong. Every time I run upstairs to hide my ugly face, every time I settle on the floor to drown my bad habits in sins, I realize I am slowly chipping away at my potential.

“You have to have had potential,” a loving voice tells me. “You never did, sweetie.”

It is not the demon who speaks- the demon only laughs. But I do not bother turning.

I know it is the beautiful sister I never had, cold arms wrapping around my waist. She is a comfort that brings about an edge of discomfort, which ensures I am just the right amount on edge. The only time I am okay with being alive.

I scroll through my favorite website, indulging in short stories that impart nothing, and realize she is right.

“You are disgusting,” an anonymous user tells me when I appreciate the pain that comes from lost love. It is not my story I am commenting on, yet I am abhorrent enough that even here, even in the corner of the world on this small story on a small fandom, I attract hate. Karma follows me like a demon looking to possess a vessel, always lurking a few feet, hidden in the corner. It is my fault I used to nestle there as a child, holding books inches from my eyes as if it would be the last thing I saw.

“I am disgusting,” I want to write. “I used to stick three fingers down my throat as far as I could go, gagging until my saliva coated them and the remnants of food swam in the toilet seat below me. I would look in the mirror and see bloodshot eyes and oatmeal residue dripping from my mouth and thought it was the most wonderful sight in the world. I spent so long in the bathroom that my room barely showed signs of a life. I humped myself to sleep when I was barely in fourth grade, my mother finding me under the blanket with my pajamas cast aside, shame building in my throat as she lovingly told me to pray. I did not know what I was doing, but the demons had possessed me from even then. I read porn not a foot away from my sleeping mother in the eighth grade when I had yet to learn about the re-productive organs of men and women. I used to avoid romance novels because I knew I could never fall in love like that, and if I could not, then why should fictional characters enjoy that privilege?”

Before I can, I think about the poor author whose work I am writing underneath. I think about reading such horrid secrets under whatever I produce with pride, and then close the browser.

I am a manipulator, but only to my parents.

What does that make me? Someone who harms only those who care for her.

The guilt should wrack my soul, but I sleep soundly.

“Become bitter or become better.” My brother tells me one day, confronting me in a peaceful kitchen. There are tears running down my face, snot clogging my airway, and I almost faint when my brother grabs my arm to prevent me from running to the bathroom.

“Let go!” I breathe, and he mercifully does, warning me that he will not talk to me again. I run to the bathroom anyway.

The sight in the mirror is not the comforting one. My face is an ugly red, the fluids running down my face having nothing to do with the paltry breakfast I ate. I return quickly, because even if my brother has lost respect for me, I could never handle losing him forever.

After all, who else would have taught me that throwing up was going to save me?