Exaggerate/Emergency

I am blogging again. Like a crutch. Like a last desperate attempt to reason with my actions. Like another wasted soul just trying to see if there is anyone else out there. Blogging because I can’t tell anyone.

It is bitterly cold. Icy winter sun and an arctic breeze grace my window in the study hall. The heaters are broken. Every florescent light in this place is on the blink. It just adds to the unreality of the situation. My hands are frozen solid. The limited motion I am afforded in my fingers I am using to type, but each movement sends pins and needles through the solid frigidity in my palms. I should have worn more clothes; I should have two pairs of tights, and pants, and two long-sleeved tops, and a singlet, and my school shirt, jumper and jacket on; and maybe a pair of gloves and a balaclava. Then I might be warm. I’m only feeling the cold because I didn’t get much sleep the last few days. I am surprised that I did manage to sleep at all, physically I did, but mentally I think it had just the same result as being awake and anxious for two days.

I am caught in a limbo. A Catch 22, a Schrödinger’s Cat; and I daren’t open the box that is not even mine to open.

To tell and avert the consequences that are such a minute chance that it’s almost negligible, yet suffer the punishment for it nonetheless; to tell a tale of a situation even more remote, even less important, but whose telling to unlistening ears is unavoidable. Or not to tell and suffer a different punishment, one of excruciating waiting and foolish relief; or certain life altering disaster, in which case the tale would be told anyway.

But the sad fact is it is already too late. Somewhere down the track I chose the second path. The one less mature, the one I swore I would never choose after seeing all those terrible movies.

Waiting.

Every single sign, the cold, the lights, the mental anguish… made worse by the fact that no-one is here. Not a friend, not a teacher, not an internet acquaintance present.
All. Safe. Home.
A cruel trick. A road safety presentation of one and a half hours. Injuries, crashes, risk, death, alcohol – and the refrain ‘I never thought it would happen to me.’

Something so simple, so blind and easy, remembered once in the most amazing soft almost tactile colours, becomes now a harsh brutal replay; a wild jumble of images colours, sounds, consequences and motivation, still all over me; every detail scrutinised for yet more mistakes, which are found time and time again.
No voice of reason now. No eternal truth known from the start and only clouded by immense flights of fancy. The statistics are on my side but reason is not. If it were inevitable, or an almost certain chance then everything would be a complete disaster, but the decision would be much easier. But this tiny statistic, this insignificant variable, probably come from the mouth of fools and fakes – is all that I have. This logical belief, the last shred of reason I possess, still tells me that it should all be OK. Should, all be OK. These weasel words. How long can you talk about nothing? How long can you go without confessing? Will I laugh about this in years to come? Will I recount this in the face of an even worse tragedy citing it as the precursor?

This has brought me into the present time in a big way. Nothing else matters that much, it holds no sway over this. No sway and no escape.
Distraction into study, into work, into books – maybe.
But a constant reminder in the whims, in the thought, the habit – but feeling no longer. The cause of the problem is me. The absence of the part of myself that was the problem is an absence of self.
I have no-one to blame. Why, out of all the things that I feared, that have fuelled so many of my self-preserving actions, did this happen? How could the same possible result occur out of such an improbable safe situation? My senses afforded me superstitious but uncanny insight, how could I have forgotten all about it? There is no-one to really blame.

Yet I am a drama queen. I can tell myself that. I can discredit my own thoughts in the face of panic. I can create some fine rendering of it for my blog. Delighting in the expression of my own sorrow. Caught up in the allegory of it all because it’s so easy to forget what it is when it’s undefined. I can use it in a way that could be done no other way; I can milk my own misfortune for art to come. And then feel relieved in equally ambiguous style sometime later. Another experience, another heartbreak, another false alarm that somehow affords me insight into tragedy without getting burnt. Because somehow, ‘things like that never happen to me.’

☆