I can feel the ocean of sleep crashing against the door of caffeine.

Sleep needs to wait until I can write this down though. The nap needs to wait.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I'm so sorry. I can’t open the door and let you take me away just yet. There are things to do, things I need to write down, things I need to whisper to the winds and the birds:

Carry this message in your throat and rudely disturb the bliss of people.

It is important they hear this loud and clear so:

Clear Your Throats.

Create a cacophany so LOUD that we can barely hear our own thoughts;

Drown them and wake us up with the gentle tapping of chime against wind chime,

The tweeting of birdsong against dreaming souls.

 

They never listen to us when we complain. Why would they listen when a passionate cry yells out for help? "These moats, they are filled with foam cubes, but could easily be filled with crocodiles by a slight perspective shift" [1].

[1] Isaac Elm

This isn’t what I need to write.

No, no, no.

This isn’t it. This is a digression.

 

The thumping, thump-thumping against the door to this cottage is blending into the sound of my own heartbeat matching pace.

Thumping, thump-thumping its way out of my mouth and into my hands.

Pushing the words out, urging fervent word-vomit to become poetry.

 

Why am I falling apart now that I am in my safe place?

Why is there the thumping thump-thump of anything invading this place I created, imagined, molded with my own hands?

 

Here’s what I need to say. Here’s what happens when you’ve been napping too long or not enough or when it's a way to avoid something that demands action-

 

Trying to stay stationary so that the world passes by you easier is easier. There is an anger inside me and you and while we can’t really do anything to realize the anger into something more productive (at least not now), and while the anger has worn us down until we feel exhausted, we are never really extinguished.

The waters of dreams are seeping from under the door and here I am, writing another digression.

You should know,

Your flame can never be extinguished.

There is no wind strong enough.

You, the idea of you, the physical you, the metaphysical you, the real you, the created you. You are standing in a sea of tall, green grass, looking out over the ocean from a cliff. The house of memories behind you, you can feel the strong gusts of wind billow all around you, pulling and pushing at your hair and clothes, asking you to lean into its rough caress just as the grass does by your ankles. There's a sound of grass softly brushing against grass as waves of cool air gust over it, carrying with it the gentle scent of ocean and rock. The scent of the ocean wraps itself around your flame. Flickering slightly, your flame cannot extinguish. Not even after you do.

The universe rippled when you existed, the fabric of space wrinkled when you took your first steps, the wind moved a little to the left because you were standing in its way. And thus remains your flame long after you snuff yourself out, a reminder that this ripple, this wrinkle, and this crinkle was all because of you, and you continue to light the world around you.

The water reaches my toes and I flinch in surprise. It's warm.

     

Anger is exhausting.

It can be exhaustive.

It can be extinguished.

But not you. Never you.

 

And because you remain, flickering in the loud, cacophonous winds of the ocean, so can the anger return. But instead of making it a productive act of social justice, it falls into you. It becomes about you. Fueled on you, it can overthrow worlds.

But until then--

Waiting At The Door by Ramesh K Nambiar (2011)

Waiting At The Door by Ramesh K Nambiar (2011)

I am falling apart in the space that I created as my own escape is because I am safe in a space. With the anger and passion that was holding me so tightly coiled dissipating, I can finally hear the thumping thump-thumping of my heart and the ocean, of my parents knocking on the bathroom door asking

“Are you okay? Open the door.”

"Beta, are you okay?"

"open the door"

"please open the door?"

I am not really falling apart by falling apart. It’s like if you break a bone in your body and it heals in the wrong way, temporarily, just to get through to the end goal. Word(s) cause a pain, action(s) cause a trauma, and you heal it in the wrong way, temporarily, just to get through the day. Just to finish the project. Just until you can reach the place of safety where it’s okay to break the bone, cause the pain, re-live the trauma so you can fix it in the right way. You'll tolerate the small pain to avoid dealing with the big pain, at least for now. Until the band aid can be replaced with something more structurally sound, you cannot go about attacking the thing that attacked you. You need to teach your fingers how to become a fist before you can punch it in the air; an act of resistance.

Day Dreams by Theodore Robinson (1889)

Day Dreams by Theodore Robinson (1889)

 

The oceans of sleep are working in conjunction with the waters of dreams to beckon me into the bosom of rest so I can begin my process of recreating in the entirety.

 

I have to break myself and become a new myself. I have to break myself and recreate myself. A new myself that exists because of the old myself.

 

“Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo,” every new remediation of myself is another version, a new being [2]. In the end, we are all remediating off of each other; remediated versions of each other.

[2] Maggie Nelson The Argonauts

I breathe life into myself over and over again as I grow like a ginger, unstructured yet patterned; growing outwards and at an angle. Ugly, maybe, but very good for your health.

Maybe a nice long nap will uncoil the spring of pain and rip off the duct tape band aids of trauma. It’s going to hurt, but isn’t that why growth pains are called that?