The Shroud Of Selves
Darkness shrouds her clearing to a void of cords and sounds. Disjointed nothingness. In there she finds herself walking in the dark slowly. As if she would fall into a cliff at any moment. She sees Pedro. Glazy like a foggy mirror. The others transfiguring behind him.
Nothing again.
Just her, pacing back and forth talking to the silent smoky figures.
“Validating my thoughts means nothing in the face of the parts of me screaming right now, telling me to stop him, to bring him back. That it wasn’t all bad. These same parts seem to be holding hostage the ones that told me to run away in the first place. Pedro was my safety. I could be anything and still expect to be loved.
Was it love? Did I make it all up?
His look of annoyance at my random antics—me dancing, burping in front of him, singing songs happily- him rolling his eyes toward nothing— made any ounce of joy I felt vanish.
The safety in nothing. The pain of vanishing into nothing, yet somehow finding comfort in it. Damn thoughts. Stop. Continue. Stop. Continue. In love I felt elated one moment, crashing the next. What am I afraid of? Control. Control was knowing that look of nothing when I showed my true self. It reminded me of the looks I got when Mom or Dad told me to package up my joy because “girls don’t do that.” Manners. Eat like this. Walk like this. Talk like this. I have this faint memory of vanishing at the sound of all those directions, like a distorted foggy version of my childhood self.” It hurts. Silence. She stops.
Shroud comes again .. and restarts again with more pacing…
This time she is stomping around the place, her nostrils flaring, her hands flailing about. “Who am I? How do I even see myself? What and who am I to other people? I sabotage every version of me that wants to be liked by others.” She stops. “But is it sabotage, or is it my true self fighting to see the light above everyone else’s version of me?” She falls to the floor with her voice quietly saying “I imagine her, fighting Mom and her constant criticism, Dad and his overwhelming anger, my sister and her fear entangled with rage and will to live at peace, my brother’s intellectualization of his feelings, and my Nana’s heart hardening when she felt people didn’t love her.”
Her chest tightens with pressure waiting to be released. “I’m tired of fighting them. Tired of shoving them down into the darkness, only for them to gang up on me, shoving me back into the silence. Cold. Isolated. Feeling its better off people don’t know this me. Gasping for air in a tiny crowded room. The best parts of them, and the worst parts of them, in me, fighting to come out… Who am I without them around me? They are me, but not at the same time. Would I love myself if I told them to shut the fuck up for once and let ME breathe freely? “
“Am I still loud? Am I still creative? Am I still self-gratifying and empathetic at the same time? Self-critical and anxious, confident and wanting to fit in. Could I be loved as I am if I shed all of them?” Air is shrinking from her lungs again. She cant speak anymore.
A shroud opens and unfocused lights comes through.
The alarm sounds. The window is open, and some rain is pouring into the room. Air. Gasping air. Sounds returning to her ears. The ac, the rain hitting it. An air purifier in the background. This whole time, not a muscle had moved but she felt exhausted. The jolt of running to close the window as the rain poured in similar to the adrenaline hitting runners at the finish line of a race.
She looks at the rain through the window and imagines her life as a rom-com, where this was just a rainy scene and the sun would shine next, making everything easy in the next few takes.
The shroud creeps slowly from her chest, tightening up her throat, numbing her hands, choking the air from her lungs again.
“Pedro left. Which part of me left with him? Which one am I grieving right now?”
“No. Stop. I have to feed the cats. They see me as I am, only expecting to be fed and kept safe in return.”
She closes the windows and turns with her back touching the puddle of water leaning against the window.
“Fuck. I think I get cat ladies now.”