Confessions of a Schizophrenic

You’ve got to bleed. You’ve got to hurt and let the sun consume you. Swallow you whole until you burn, burn, burn to ashes – until finally, you are free. It is that which you seek, this liberation from the beautiful lie you live. Got to keep breathing, because that’s all you can do. Got to fall, faster and faster – crystal meth dulling your senses, gasoline down your throat.

The alarm clock rings, but you find that for once in your goddamn life, you couldn’t care less. Same thing, same stupid fucking boring routine. Death is the ultimate escape, or so you’ve heard. It’s the freedom to do whatever you’re not brave enough to do right now. It’s no more pain, no more hurt or anger or betrayal. Every drag from a fucking cigarette’s taking you one step closer to death, but when you try to quit, you find that you can’t. Because you need this, need to know that with every breath, you’re one step closer.

You need that thin smoke to survive. You need the bruised skin and swollen eyes and the scarred lips and the hollow cheeks. You need it more than you need life itself. The only thing you’re breathing for. But oh, you’re scared – so scared, so terrified of the blue lips and the marble skin and being six feet under.

Pull back, pull back, because no matter how calm you are, no matter how confident, no matter how apathetic, no matter how fucking ready you think you are, you are not ready to die.

So now you’re just smoke – that’s all you are. Wisps of smoke, released in a ragged exhale, clinging desperately to a skeleton bleached white. You’re alive, or so you like to tell yourself. Your name, darling, your name, your name, your name – and it’s such a pointless word, isn’t it, because it doesn’t mean anything. Those three syllables get caught in your throat, and it’s the water that you’re choking on as you struggle to keep your head tilted upwards, and it’s the hazel autumn devoured by a monochrome winter, a door slamming shut and tears in your eyes, and an involuntary tremor, your seven deadly sins, your charcoal moonlight, your crash and fall and descent from the heavens.

Today, you study the plain face in the glass, memorize the gentle slope of a wide nose, the eyes that are set just too far apart, the thin, slightly parted lips that breathe fog onto your own image. This is you, and it’s him too. It’s the monster that lurks behind closed doors, that preys only in the dark. Too many victims, too much blood, too many dirty motels. But still, but still, you find that you need it so much more than you need last night’s ecstasy or Wednesday’s prostitute. What do you need? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever known.

You’re old, and you’re worn and beaten and broken, but you love yourself. I hate you. I hate the way you smoke. I hate the way you think you’re the center of the universe. It’s so amusing to me. I love it. You’re the funniest thing on Earth, you know that? I’m a despicable person. It burns. It burns my fingertips. You hold the cigarette too close to the candle, and you watch as flames lick away at your skin. It’s Death staring at you in the face. Jump. Jump, jump, jump, because you know your lungs are blackened and burnt anyway. They’re my lungs, not yours. Why don’t you just step outside to get a cup of coffee? I don’t like coffee. Liked it yesterday. Well, yesterday, I also wore my heart on my sleeve, watched it char and tear and tatter.

Yesterday, I woke up and I couldn’t even breathe. Forgot to.

And for you, it’s all worth it, isn’t it?

Look at him. Such a moron.

It reminds me that I’m alive, and it reminds me that I’m dead.

It reminds you of the person you used to be?

Still a moron. He doesn’t get it.

What don’t I get?

That person doesn’t exist anymore.

You’re alive. But only just. You can’t stand them, and some days you pull out your hair and wonder why. But then you remember why. You remember white walls and white beds and an IV. White. You remember white. And then you remember how easy it is to stain white – you remember the red of the unused tennis shoes in the corner, next to the plastic chair and the locked door. Red. Crimson. Scarlet. Such a beautiful colour. Such a free colour. And all of a sudden you’re Atlas and all you want to see is red because you can’t stand this blue and this sky and this storm and these clouds. So you remember pain and anger. You remember a knife. And I held that knife to my wrist and I remember my own fingers and my own hands and I remember trying to wash the sheets off. Because it’s so easy to lose yourself in this reality. Just as easy as you get lost in your dreams. Are they dreams?

When will you learn? They’re memories, you goddamn idiot.

And you take the pills each night so you don’t remember them. Because they hurt.

They hurt me so fucking much. Woah, hold up there a moment now – was that two or three pills you just took?

One more won’t hurt.

You know, you can’t keep doing this.

Just let me throw away the sheets.

But remember to leave the walls white.

Why?

A reminder.

Of what?

Of the blood that once stained them.

Can’t they see, can’t they see that with each breath, I’m dying?

That’s bullshit.

The red velvet curtains have closed, and the audience melts away and I’m only left with myself. But there’s too many of me, and I don’t know what to do. The only thing left is the single spotlight, focused on your body – on her spine, the one that’s starting to collapse in on itself.

I can’t swallow and he can’t breathe and she can’t think because your train of thought has derailed and there’s nothing I can do about it because there is nothing you have ever been able to do about it and she never realized that the tracks had stopped long ago, that now there’s only blankness, an emptiness, and now it’s dead and now it’s gone and he’s plunging down a cliff, and we need to know there’s something there, because if there isn’t, they don’t know what they’ll do because it has to be real and there has to be something or else I swear I’ll go mad because I don’t think this is real and I don’t want this to be real and it can’t be real and despite everything, all I ever wanted was to be seen, and to know if I was the real one, or if I was the fake one, and you don’t know what this is doing to me, because I don’t know the truth about anything anymore, but without them – without them...

Without them, I am nothing. I am no one.

They told me – the others, not me – that it would all get better. What if I like them? What if I like this? But I swallow the pills anyway, and I can feel the tablets as they churn in my empty stomach. For the first time in years, my head is silent. The whispers have faded, and chills trail down my spine, but I’m crying, because I love them, and I miss them, and who am I, really, if they aren’t there to guide me? They were my family, and these people – the ones in the white coats with the clipboards and ballpoint pens and their needles and soft croons – they’re the enemies, and I don’t like them, because they took away everything that I ever loved, and they replaced it with this terrifying silence. They took away my friends, and now it’s only me left.

Where has everyone gone?

Away, away.

Come back. Come back to me. Please, I beg of you. Come back. If it’s the last thing you do – if it’s the last thing I do. Let me see you one last time. Let phantom images capture a hazel gaze, and let me say goodbye to the ghosts of my past one more time – one last time.

But goodbyes hurt, and maybe it’s better to leave it this way.

I call them back to me, and this time, it’s different because for once, I welcome them. The door is wide open, but now the walls are green and I don’t know what’s happening because this isn’t any place I’ve ever known, but I just know – I just know that I’ve been here before, and perhaps this was me before they came to rescue me, came to sweep me off my feet and take me to the place where there’s only white and white and more white and so much white that I think I could possibly die from the white.

A breath is held, and she refuses to exhale until they return, but at last, her lungs feel like they’re about to burst, and she has to allow the bittersweet rush of oxygen to fill her body, and the cool air is once again rushing through choked veins to a heart that continues to beat, to beat and beat and beat.

They’re still not here.

We’re not one anymore.

Where have you gone?

Perhaps they’re gone for good this time.

This is what you wanted, isn’t it?

No, I never wanted this.

So you light up another. And you breathe in the same smoke you did yesterday.

And you die.

And you die.

And you die.