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You Are Past My Comprehension |
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"You Are Past My Comprehension”
He’s missing from the cutout place I made for him again. There’s a gaping hole here hanging in the air, made and tailored to fit the perfect dimensions of his shape and size. It’s a custom fitting that has stopped being used, and I don’t approve of it. He wormed his way into my life in so many different ways, became closer to me than any brother or lover ever could be, and now he’s gone. I don’t know how to fill this spot in my reality that was made just for him to fit into. So many names and faces and combinations of both pass me by every single day and yet none of them belong to him anymore like they used to. I used to see him everywhere, and now I don’t. It’s like I’ve gone color blind, and you are the only color that I cannot distinguish like I used to. I don’t understand why it bothers me so much, but the simple fact is that it does more than I’m willing to admit. I was so naïve, thinking he would never leave me like he did. He promised, and I believed him in a way I never should have allowed myself to believe anyone. Then again, I knew no better than to assume he would always be around. And now I miss him more than I ever thought it was possible to miss anyone. But how can you measure how much someone means to you until they’re gone? You can’t tell if you’ll miss something that isn’t missing.
And now that you’re missing, I’m missing you.
You fit into my schedule better than if you had written it yourself. Bright and early when I woke up you were always there beside me, waiting patiently for me to dress before we went down to the cafeteria for breakfast. You sat in the backs of all my classes learning the same material I did, watching me learn and occasionally supplying me with the answers that wouldn’t come to my brain readily like they should have. You always knew I was smarter than they gave me credit for. You always knew the answer, and that the same answer hovered somewhere in my brain waiting to be found at the right moment. You were always there for those moments. After my blocks were done you always followed me to wherever I felt like traveling: to the dorms, the woods, into the city where everything was bright and loud and colorful. It was always too much for me to handle on my own. I was always glad that you would go with me and keep me safe from harm. I don’t know what I would have done without you. At night you were always there in my bed with me, holding me against you and whispering lullabies too soft for my roommate to hear. We never paid attention to her very much unless we had to. It was clear she didn’t approve of your being near me. She refused to speak to you and frowned whenever I talked to or mentioned you. You thought she was jealous of our relationship. I thought she was concerned on my behalf. She was the one thing we couldn’t agree on.
Now that you’re gone those moments don’t match. Nothing is the same as it was. I want some kind of familiarity with my life and yet it all left me when you did. This doesn’t feel like me, this person who walks and sleeps and talks and cries herself to sleep every night longing for your return everyone says is never coming.
No one is sympathetic.
Everyone feels sorry for my pain.
I’ve been told that with time things will go back to normal, that life will flow back into the river of time it had been before you tossed all those ripple-making pebbles into it. Everyone is trying to help me through this nightmarish mess you’ve left me in. No one is being very helpful to me in my time of need. They keep putting thyme in the herbal tea I buy at the college coffee shop to calm me until that day comes. Everyone says the past needs to be left in the past, but when I had wanted you to be a part of my future how do I let you go without a fight? And then comes the real question. How do you fight for someone that isn’t there anymore? I would kick and scream, bite and slap, punch and cry if it would make you come back and stay with me forever just like I was promised by your lips that you would. Whatever it takes to claim you as my own, I am willing to do.
I want you back, forever.
You smile at me at this point. You always smile when we reach this part of the discussion. Although this isn’t really a discussion at all, because you never talk back or respond to anything I say or do. You simply listen and allow me free range. I like that about you. It lets me feel free to express myself in a way no one but him ever allowed me to be. He was the first person to let me be myself.
I have never talked to anyone about all of this other than you. You are the only one safe person in my world now that he’s gone, the only place I can spill out my thoughts and be dissected. This couch is the only other thing that’s real: just you, me, this couch, and the memories of him that everyone wants me to forget. Everyone but you, I think. Only you seem to understand me, but you don’t understand me at all. No one understands me.
He understood me.
He held me close while I cried and stroked my hair the way I liked it to be touched. He held my hand proudly in a crowd and kissed me on the cheek when he knew people were watching us. He knew all my insecurities about myself, and always made my flaws seem nonexistent in his presence. He knew all my thoughts, my dreams, my fears, my pains. He knew everything about me.
Maybe that’s why it hurt me so much when he left.
It’s these damn pills that drove him away. You shake your head at me and smile sadly, like you think you know better than me why he’s abandoned me like this. Say whatever you want, but I won’t listen.
I know the truth.
These pills sent him running.
These damn doctors sent him away.
These cold white walls sent him heading for the hills.
This damn couch made him leave me.
You made him leave me.
Shake your head all you want to. I know what I know, and you can’t change my mind. You, and all of them, have conspired against me. Tell me all you want that there’s no conspiracy. I know the facts you want to hide from me. I know why you and the doctors keep me heavily medicated in my hospital room.
If this is really what you can call a hospital that is.
There are never any visitors here for me or anyone else. You call us wards, not invalids, not patients even thought I know that’s what we are. There isn’t a sane person among us. If we’re even still considered people, being here like we are. More like a zoo full of vicious animals close to snapping out at whoever sticks a finger into the cage. I know better than to think I’m still considered human. After all, we’re all locked away from society for their protection.
You correct me again as usual.
It’s for my protection that I’m here. I always laugh at this excuse. It wasn’t society that screamed and cried like a lunatic in the middle of her college classes. It wasn’t society that cursed out half a class of biology students and one very flustered professor. Society didn’t throw test tubes at the note-covered blackboard just to see them shatter and hear other people’s screams match hers. Society didn’t throw a stool through the second floor window of the lab. Society didn’t catch the laboratory at one of the leading science-minded universities in the country on fire just to watch it burn.
No, you admit that was me.
Finally some progress. You’ve seen my side this one time. And yet I can never convince you to stop the medication that comes to me three times a day. The doctors tell me it’s to suppress my delusions, keep me safe and sane. More like it keeps me docile, too drugged to cause another outburst. But if it makes me safe, why am I still locked in my room at night, never allowed to leave the building without an escort of at least two bodyguards. I can’t even open my own window in my room because the shutters are bolted down. Nothing is open here. Nothing ever has been. I ask when I can leave this place and go home.
You say I can’t leave until I’m more stable and ready to be back living on my own. I tell you I am. I don’t care if I have to lie to you now if it means escaping this place. Especially if it means getting him back. You insist I’m not capable of normalcy just yet, that you know as well as I do that I would stop taking my medication as soon as I was back at my dorm room.
I agree with you.
There’s no point in lying to you about this, it’s a solid-enough fact I don’t feel strange admitting it. For a change we’re on the same page. I would sooner throw these pills out the window than be mellowed out by drugs forced down my throat unwillingly. I want him back at any cost. Even my sanity, even if I know I don’t have much of that to spare.
You tell me my time is up for today.
You have other crazy people to listen to.
I nod and stand, wait for my guard to escort me back to my room.
He locks the door behind me as usual. I lie down on my bed to think. Wishing for you to fill the spaces left inside my heart that used to hold you. Your image is hazy around the edges as you sit down on the edge of my bed, taking my hand in yours. My fingers go right through you. We both have tears in our eyes now. But at least you’ve come back is all I can tell him, and he smiles at me sadly, nodding. I hear the carts coming down the hallway – its time for another pill to keep him away from my head and my reality. He looks panicked and tries to touch me, failing, but promising that he will return as soon as he can.
I smile as my doctor enters my room, asks me how I’m feeling, and leaves after making sure I swallow all of my pills. He knows better than to leave without checking. He found out I was hiding them under my tongue when the flowers on my bedside table started dying too quickly over and over again. Apparently whatever is packed into the medicine they give me kills them when it dissolves into the water they drink to survive.
They call this confusion I live in paranoid schizophrenia. They say that he doesn’t exist anywhere but in my mind, even though I know it can’t be true if I can see and touch him. They say I only imagine those feelings and sights. I know they’re wrong. The doctors say my condition, as they call it, is treatable with time and drugs if I cooperate with them.
I smile anyways even though I know they’ve got me pegged for a loony unfairly. For once I’ll let this one slide and cooperate with them. They’ve won this round, but these doctors and psychiatrists will not keep me down forever.
He will always return.
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