272: To Be Home

It has been said that people who have Aspergers are deep thinkers and poets. I think for me this is a definite truth.

Sometimes I just sit and write whatever pours out of me….well often I do. I see pictures and images, and see a story created in my mind, and I also hear the words. I feel the rhythm of each word and syllable. It is smooth, unless I write the “wrong” word, and then I feel a huge stop, or barrier in the whole of me. This selection I wrote this morning in about fifteen minute, or however long it took to type. It is, to me, the longing for connection, for another, for the missing piece to be filled, for the agape of the creator or completion of the lover, though lover in essence is not completion. It is the heart’s cry to crawl out of the illusion of one and the isolation of desired recognition, the want to be seen and to be unified and brought back to the place of whole. To be blanketed in everlasting love. To be home.

Today I have this monster of angst and unsettled sensation stirring and grumbling inside of me. Like an emptied stomach craving a food it cannot imagine, cannot picture, cannot name. Only he roars nonetheless, told by another unidentified form that he is hungry, though he knows not the essence or meaning of hunger.

Today I have the demon of demise wrapped upon me, sitting on my lap unopened and uncared for, his hauntingly spirit enticing my delight. I long to reach into the unopened and explore, but know too well the finger shall be ripped and torn, and I, left to bleed, will weep for what was touched without end.

Today I snore in silence, my trumpeting sounds of slumber unheard, and thusly unmatched, unconquered and unquenched. I am territory that lays barren, untraveled and unclaimed. I wait, this land I am, for victim to unravel and unfold upon me; so I may, too, unravel and unfold and sleep beside, a spoon to spoon, a treasure to hold and keep; until the sun comes and I am but shadow upon shadow, a vision of myself in the coming light.

Today I spawn and spin, dazzled by your substance, which I cannot touch or breathe, but in your name. And words alone do not fill me, only deplete, so I am hallowed once more, deeper and deeper into self with only your thought. I cannot dance with you; I cannot bend myself into the latitude or longitude of where you stand. Though my desire deceives me, I wish upon the star of you like no other, and long with every scaffold of my lingering heart to climb upon you and feel the ever pounding of your being.

Today you are a vision dressed in the white of memory, unreachable and distinguished, high upon high; so distant that the thought of you still flies with broken wing to find where you begin. I cannot think upon you without being pulled back and hidden behind a barrier. I cannot envision you without seeing the bleakness and black and torrential rain. All about the dancing birds sing, and yet their calls are as the demon’s last meal, broken into bones and crushed in misery of the masses.

Today I scale the mountain of my own desire and stand face-to-face with what I have thusly named you. And how you stare at me through a tunnel within a tunnel, carved out of stone of the Gods. I hear them calling you back to them, and yet I remain screaming, as if my name, my place, my stance could pull you back against the darkness that pulls your thicker and thicker into the spinning weight of now.

Today no name, no wish, no answer is found, because all about you have climaxed and advanced, beyond the space of my imagined time. You are but whisper, hidden ghost between the sheets and layered curtains of nonexistence. You haunt me with your beauty and majestic ways; you entice me time and time again, an ocean rising at the peak of me, my lady parts, and then departing like a serpent eating through my soul. My organs bleed, my skin opens, your darkness enters and feeds again, and I am left less victim than willing participant in the horror that seems home.

Today I beseech you king of mastery, the pillar of my mind that falls as domino sweetly planned, the steep and valley set upon a table for child’s play. Knock me down, one by one, a mountain crumbled upon itself, the pieces separate but together, clanging and tumbling in a makeshift play created by the creator. Watch as the stumbling begins, as the one upon the next beats down to the final destiny of end.

For Today, at the end point you shall find me. The last to be fallen. The last alone. The singular hitting stone, when all else hit each other. Oh to be the starting point, the first, the beginning touched by your grazing hand. Though slapped, and forgotten and used for your design only, to still be shaken by your very hand, least the last dying domino in a line of soldiers forgotten.

Today, I bid you farewell, buried beneath the whole of me, siphoned and forgotten; and with each goodbye that comes and goes, resurfaces like the endless tides, I bid again, in dying breath; my last words the echo of my discernment wept and lost, my judgment buried, that which rests beneath shadow of hope, the darkened space forgotten where dreams die in the dungeon of invisible.

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A short poem written before the previous selection, this morning; my first attempt to remove the angst inside. This is about confusion of emotions, of the confusion of being, of the not wanting to be seen and shaped by others as something I am not. It is about physical and mental pain. Before today, I didn’t say what my writing is supposed to be about. I think it is beneficial for the reader to take what they want from words and leave the rest. But for some reason, I needed to explain today. I don’t know why. I just do. Perhaps to make this life seem more real, and you more connected to me. I haven’t edited any part of this or changed it. It is a poem of thoughts and processing.

I’m on my couch, laptop in lap, a redundancy

I’m on the couch, hands hurting, as they do, with the onset of any suspicion

The body is up to something, some little bug or minor fixing

And thusly I am made captive to the lingering pain

Not right, not on, not balanced, and my frail substance bleeds

Calling out for the memory of form

The memory of childhood wholeness

I’m on the couch, and the clock ticks, his neighbor black fridge hums

A scent carries from somewhere and everywhere

Something stale, something clean, something cooked

Scraping of my bones matches the pale scraping of my eyes

As the lashes clash and sting, their delight in the dancing dust

I am a vision to behold onto myself

When all about the world spins and I am left as prisoner freed

On tiny island

Where river no longer rushes through, but salt of air tears in between the blue

Feed me your sanity

Feed my your joy

Pour the essence of what is right and just into the soul of me

I cry out to the universal prose

The poet that hides inside the caverns of my hallowed grave of sorrow

Chase me down to the corners where I weep

Come find me, lost and barren

The babe of my youth sucked out with the tentacles of divine crucified

By hungry mouths that feed off of pain and badgered sorrow

I am but child fed upon by the worldly ways

Nibbled piece by piece

Dissected and set out to dry in chunks of unsettled misery

And you, are victim doubled

Your shattered dreams set upon the wind

As if the substance of nothing will blow back to you

In the absence of time

For there is nothing good

Nothing real

But the vision of the love I carry

And too, you needle this out of me

Siphon upon serpent siphon

And sting me once again

With the wicked ways of me

Tear down your mirror

Tear down this reflection you pounce upon me

Chisel me whole again

Excavate my ruins

Bring me out of the hidden mass

And revere, behold, befuddled me

Make me into the man I am

Before turning me into the demon you demand

——–

Samantha Craft, December 2012

Day 231: Temporary

(This is a continuation from yesterday’s post: Day 230 Tornado )

From the backseat of a dented sedan, amongst a cluttering of mismatched suitcases, I drew in my breath through my nostrils and lowered my head in doleful resignation. There, outside my car window atop a plateau, slept a muddy-brown structure—most of its windows draped in faded tangerine sheets.

“There it is,” Ben said, curling his lips into a satisfied grin and tapping his hands on the steering wheel to the beat of the song Sexual Healing.

The car engine stopped.  The music stopped.  And Ben started.  “Just take a look,” he said with an easy stroke to Mother’s sleeveless shoulder.  “It’s just like I told you. Look!”

Glancing forward and to the left a bit, I followed Ben’s rounded back up, and then across and down the length of his burly arm to his stubby finger which pointed through the window to a pathetic dwelling; which alas, to my deep disappointment, appeared to be the worst house on the best street in town.  Not only was the house in desperate need of paint and the yard weeping with neglect, but the mailbox itself was a rusted clump of sadness.  My soon to be new home, this place I would slumber and eat, shower and dress, and partake in life in general, was ironically misplaced, set out in front of the world in its worst garment and accessories.

Knowing what to do, almost instinctively, I narrowed my eyes into a half-squint and scanned the surface alternating the image of the house from blurry to clear and back again to blurry.  I’d looked at my reflection in the mirror in the same way, after discovering by blurring my reverse-self I was momentarily able to erase all visible flaws.

 

The rest is in the book 🙂

 

Day 179: Paste Me to the Moon

Photographs of State Park in Washington (July 2012)

I am lost for words today. A woman in a forest of thoughts and mystery, both intrigued and frightened by her own mind.

I am between two rivers, two streams of thought, of how I am to be and what I want to be.

I question my every need, my every desire, my unyielding passion. And yet I know I am pure. I know I am enough. But I wonder where to turn in my mind. Where to stop. Where the boundaries are…when thoughts are exhausted and nothing else exists.

I only want to be loved. I only long to give love. But why do I long? Where does the longing rise from? Where is the switch? This knowing? This intensity? Where is this me that calls from beneath the shadows?

I measure everything. I place abstractness on scales. My actions are spared, as my thoughts have been filtered through and through, weighed out, analyzed, scrutinized…my actions don’t have a chance…they are absent…missing…vapors evaporating before they breathe.

Where do I travel? Where do I go? Why am I a lone wanderer on a planet that does not feel familiar and in a body and form I do not recognize? Why can I see others more clearly than my own self? And where do I stand? If I do not follow and do not lead, then where is my place in line?

Where is my reflection? Where do I find me. I cannot see me except through the eyes of another, and still this perception is so broken and shattered. And in my own mirror, I do not know this me. Everything in physical is not me. Every angle different and obscure. If I am not what I see and not what another sees, then what am I?

Am I my words? These symbols? These sounds? Am I energy? Am I flesh? Am I this still beating heart? Or am I more so this ache, this deep and unreachable ache. Yes, I am this ache. I am in totality this intense  ache.

So where to put me, this angst, this invisible pull that spins me into unwanted need and unneeded want. Where to put me?

Perhaps to the moon. Fly me to the moon, so I may be made whole. So that I may exist as an unmistakable mass dancing in empty space. My purpose only to move and stir. Paste me there. My image melted into one form. This searching ended. Paste me to the moon, so that I may watch from above and you may watch from below; and then we can both, from where we exist, imagine the world of the image before us.

Day 151: The Quiet Room

After yesterday’s post I feel like my panties are dangling down around my ankles. Feeling fully exposed here. I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of what I shared. Long past those emotions. I am human and have had hard times, like us all. But I feel a bit naked in my exposure of self, having had shared such a vital part of my life without much explanation.

I think it is important to understand that at the time of my nervous breakdown I had been on a low dose anti-depressant to control my chronic muscle pain. The medication entirely numbed me emotionally for years. I lived very much like a robot. I couldn’t cry even when I was sad. And I couldn’t feel the depths of my experience. I was in less pain, but had no emotions. I was numb in all aspects.

Being numb to myself had major drawbacks. I didn’t have an off button, or anything to balance my actions. Feeling nothing, I had no way of checking in with myself. I no longer knew exhaustion. I gradually became an over-achieving, control freak. Eventually, I started to despise more and more of who I was, and recognized the real me was covered and masked underneath. I decided, without consulting anyone and without being aware of the dangers, to stop my anti-depressant. In my eyes the drug was serving as a painkiller and little more. I didn’t understand that in stopping the prescription that my brain chemistry would go all haywire.

Within days of stopping, my appetite came back so strongly that I couldn’t stop eating. I gained five pounds in two days. And much worse, my serotonin levels plummeted making everything look bleak. And my emotions, they returned in a mad rush. I felt like I was opening a  storm door of emotions that had all been hidden in an expansive closet for half a decade.

After several weeks, I couldn’t stand the intensity of emotions and my huge appetite—I could actually taste life and food again but was out of control—so I started back on the medication. Reintroducing the anti-depressant into my system led to suicidal thoughts. This is when I ended up in the admissions to the psychiatry ward. I’m not saying the medication caused my breakdown but it definitely altered my brain chemistry enough to push me over the edge.

The Quiet Room

After two colored pills, I entered the last room at the end of the hall. Muffled snores, bleach, staleness—each welcomed me.

I found my bed.  I pulled off my sweatshirt and spread it across the pillow.

Darkness.

I stared up at the shadowed ceiling.

There was no sleeping.

As midnight approached, I stepped through the vacant corridor, light and clumsy, like a puppet pulled by a master puppeteer.  “I can’t sleep in there,” I mumbled, looking at the nurse’s wide forehead.  “I can’t sleep with a stranger in my room.”  I lowered my eyes to her white shoes, long laces, scuffed toes.

The nurse looked me over with a cynical smile.  “What are you afraid of?”

I felt a punch to my stomach.  “I just can’t sleep in there,” I answered.

Huffing, the nurse pulled down her glasses. “Fine, come with me, then.”

I padded down the hall, thinking I might fall down, hoping I would wake up, knowing this was surely hell.  The tall nurse stopped.  She edged her eyes around me, trying to see inside.  “You can stay in the Quiet Room for the night.  But it’s not where you are supposed to be.”

Chastised, I didn’t move.  I knew this wasn’t where I was supposed to be.  None of this place was where I was supposed to be.  She didn’t know me…

The rest of this story can be found in the book Everyday Aspergers.

 

Day 150: The Faded Sun

The Faded Sun

“Was it your voice or another voice that told you to kill yourself?” the stranger asked.

“My own voice,” I whispered from a mouth I could no longer feel.

I brought myself forward in a chair, a purposeful push, only to prove to myself I could move, that my brain synapses fired.  I nodded solemnly in the direction of a blank white space.  There was a stain in the high corner.  I was unable to focus, unable for the first time to pretend.  I had always been able to follow someone, to take the cue from the people around me.  Here I could not.  Here, though I was clothed, I was stripped naked, paralyzed with the thought that there were no answers…

 

The rest of this story can be found in the book Everyday Aspergers

 

Maui 2012