Sometimes, like now, it’s narration; noticing things I do, people do, anything.
Sometimes it’s wild and reckless and I can’t pin a single thought. Those times it screams at me, like a child desperate for attention.
I feel that maybe I really have lost my mind. These voices ebbing and flowing throughout the day no matter where I am or what I’m doing.
It’s 4am and I’ve been laying in one spot for 4 hours. Ready to sleep, eye mask on, didn’t touch my phone, tried not to think. Still, the mind drones on, nattering away like a neighbour you passed in the street when you were in a rush but wanted to be polite.
I am thankful for the narrator, she is soft voiced, well spoken, clear and calm. She speaks in sentences and allows me to feel that I am thinking coherently.
She keeps me awake, nights on end of no sleep. Trying in vain to turn her off but she keeps on, trying to ignore her but she is so quiet and so loud at the same time. Even in the noisiest of rooms she would be the most distinguished voice. Booming over the din of life with her lullaby rhythm. She soothes me but it never ends. I suppose she won’t stop until I have found peace. I suppose I may never know a decent nights sleep.
I am envious of the child. She comes kicking and screaming at any hour, begging to be heard. Intense desperation, the likes of which you see in a soul needing to be saved.
She is erratic and frantic and will say absolutely anything if it means she will be paid mind for a moment. She shrieks at me when I work, when I’m with friends, when I’m alone or sleeping. She begs me to allow her some time in the limelight, she wants nothing more than to dance freely with no judgement.
Then she sees the stares, the scrunched up faces of the people I feel I’ve assaulted by letting my beautiful wild mind speak. She sees them and she retreats. Mouth closed, heart racing, hands shaking, shame. Shame. Shame. She finds a stronger voice and doubles up, she still wants to speak and so I still hear her telling me to tell them anything I know on the topic they were discussing or, the one it’s led me to.
On top of that she’s kicking up a fuss. A mess of apologies, a string of incoherent babbling trying to explain herself, myself, trying to be understood. We are met with people telling us to stop talking and they laugh and it’s a joke and we know it’s a joke.
She doesn’t feel like it’s a joke. She couldn’t count the endless times of being told to stop talking. I learned to sit still, sit quiet. Don’t talk when the adults are talking, you’re interrupting. You should be in the room but not noticed. So I stifled her.
We burned with questions, observations. The little girl who sees everything, noticing everything. The little girl who creates these far reaching magical links and people look at her like she’s crazy.
So she fusses and fights and she tries to get out and she blames me for trapping her in this cage. When she gets out she rages and makes me hurt, I try to let her seep out of me, in blood, in ink, in tears. Until I have sated her enough, until she is so exhausted that much like a child she burns out and I fall asleep.
Tonight though. Tonight is the narrator. She has no personal ties, no such emotional ways and I am left with sleep grazed by my fingertips, evading, taunting as she drones on.
4:31 and the light from my phone screen is burning my eyes, it’s occurred to me that I’ve written maybe a little too much.
The narrator allows me to display myself but in giving me creativity, in giving me the capability to put myself on a page, she steals from me sleep.
She borrows time that was never meant for her, she leaves with sanity and my days are riddled with the child playing havoc.
The narrator is rarely kind enough to visit me at opportune moments. This one I will try to fight so I can say I at least had 2 hours of sleep. She fooled me into thinking I had been, what with her soothing hushed melody. I never know I’m not sleeping until it’s too late.
They take my life, they rule it, my mind never stops and I think I just might be Crazy.