Extinguished

It’s a slow, creeping, suffocating, all consuming feeling. Something isn’t right, something is wrong and can’t be seen. Your fingers dig into the gnawing ache of your chest, probing for answers between the unyielding barrier of your ribs. Short breaths hitching the cage of your organs, your brain jostles. Something has spilled inside you.

You limp to the phone, compete against aching throats and children coughing, dragged bodies begging for relief stacked up on a phone line. They are roiling, rushing, a cacophony of discomfort. You are told by a distant voice to go for a walk, breathe in time with a YouTube video. You fold at the waist, your hands are empty but you feel the weight of your spilled guts in them.

You used to move through the streets with a brain heavy with thoughts, to do lists stretched around your head like halos, the duties you held orbiting. You felt important, grounded, shoulders weighted with tasks keeping your feet moving steadily.

The facade fell so quickly, how easily we drop the things we cling to, how we think they’ll cling back to us. But they slide to new masters and you are left with the indents on your body and mind, red rub marks on your self worth. You skipped sleep for this, you missed lunch for that. Your late nights and big ideas became a two paragraph job advert thrown to the world with a careless flicked wrist.

Days stack, mismatched unremarkable like books in a shaking pile on a counter. Notebooks with two pages filled, the promise of a new start folded and forgotten. You call again, you breathe deep, you lie on a mat in the living room and the ache never lessens, the fog never lifts. You are in a grey snow globe, flurries of panic and hurt settle to warped loneliness.

Finally. Appointment day, you dress carefully shabby, show you’re trying but show you’re struggling. Pack your body into leggings and shoes, the grey mush of your flesh feels malleable. Doctor doctor, shape me please, you think with a smile, then dampen it.

It’s over. You leave the surgery with red cheeks and burning eyes, told to exercise, told of lists of names years long, winding serpentine and choking those who could help. You beg for anything, they give you a blister pack, something low dose to tide you over. The doctor shrugged, it’s worth a shot, exhausted eyes and all too knowing set of mouth. One of many, another name in the list, a link in a tightening, garrotting chain.

At home once more, your nest, your burrow. You are more animal than woman now, a creature needing warmth and soft. When your mind eats you from the inside out you must keep your flesh comfortable.

You wander back to the tv, to books, bury yourself in others words, your brain unspooling as you lie on your unmade bed and count your breathing. Cotton wool mouth forming words without sound. In the cold vacuum of answers you cast your mind back. You recount the tales of women stuck with leeches, holes drilled, arms strapped, rubber bit stuck between teeth that once smiled before the grinding weight of their skull came down.

You shudder at the thought of being held so absolutely, so infinitely, bundled up and thrown into unforgiving stone rooms. Husband, brother, doctor, son, shaking heads and signed papers. Led away by hardened eyes housed in white starched uniforms. You summon injections and restrictive baths, water so hot your eyelids flutter and your tongue swells.

You feel the stone beneath you, that school award winning imagination stuttering to life from swampy stagnation. Your hand works up the side of your face, the inside corner of your eye, imagining fluid weeping there. Ice pick pushed beneath lid, permanent, obliterating. You think maybe you’d take it now if offered.

You see lines of swaying women, moving to songs in their head that were once screams but now their feet stutter and catch on the cobbles. Unbound, tangling, torn hair and dirty nails cut short but still scrabbling at the dirt between the stones. You imagine windows and doors barred and guarded, pills slipped into your mouth.

You see yourself, some ancient self, standing before you, over you, her hair tickles your face. She smiles, lopsided, gaps in her teeth. Bruises ring her wrists as she wipes her tearing eyes with a frayed cotton gown. She is hospital property, even now. A few drops land on you, cold, burning. You hate her. She at least had her torment taken seriously.

You shake the thought, her phantom form drifts, institutionalised or ignored, locked up or turned away. Your options in the cold embrace of medicine have hardly changed in centuries.

Only it has changed, outside of vials and pills. Now you are allowed to walk, allowed to speak to HR in hushed tones and move freely through the doctor’s office without fear of endless capture.

You feel your freedom heavy on your crown. The release of being ground up in the jaws of some great and terrible machine, it’s not what you want, not really. The peace of an unshiftable label and prescribed numbness is tantalising but it didn’t work for the women you see dancing behind your eyelids, it wouldn’t work for you now.

You sit up, stretch your arms, savour the ache and pop. You gather your thoughts and your anger, hold them to your chest, they warm you. Your dull heart thuds faster. You reach for your phone, your notebook, you reach for hope that must exist between empty eyed five minute consultations and shower floor sobbing fits.

You reach, you promise to keep reaching, you promise with the cold burn of the phantom women’s tears on your cheeks. You may not be answered, but you promise to ask and push and try. Smothering hands will reach, but you cannot be extinguished.