Blue Twinkle Lights

You look like home,
the way you dance.

Unfocused eyes
See starlight shores
as a single bulb
is the lighthouse.

I dreamed of
your iced,
chilly gaze.

White twinkle lights
work in tandem,
A friend
in this lonely night.

If you were to speak
to each other
I’d overhear traded whispers
of the horizon,
spark of passion
betwixt twisted
wire.

You came with us
when we set sail.

It feels silly
to stretch your feet
into miles,
to change your cold season
to my springy step,
for a summer heat,
or by fallen leaf.

But you live so erroneously
I can’t help
but be impressed.

I do you wrong,
and you still shine
better than the rest.

Septic

I am cornered,
I am scared.
Acid rises,
throat burns,
I am weak.

Locked doors are useless
as my enemy already resides within.
I’d welcome the unwavering darkness
of the outside.

I am trapped.

Blame is shifted,
anger
burns the belly of this beast
yet he hungers for more.

It’s his own flesh and blood he feats on,
I am simply meat.

When will my eaten body parks regrow?

Can I stave off infection?

Am I septic enough for you?

One day you will rot.

Names

Taking the form
of different faces
you make me second guess myself.
To turn around in a busy street
or alone in my bedroom
you make me turn
to see if you are behind me.

Am I fun?

Do you enjoy me?

I cower in a dark corner,
no blanket thick enough
to hide from your needle
vicious emotion injected,
you make me turn
to get away from your grasp.

You take on many names
you’re never the same thing twice.
The world’s most evasive phenomenon
but the star of the show
at the same time.

You make me turn
as I am never good enough to face you.

Or so you think.

You control too much.
I won’t allow you
to take another night’s emptiness
fill with static.
How many nights do you leech from us?

Uncountable,
You exist simply because we do.

I know your name.
I know your name.

And I know mine.

Your turn.

First Appearances

I feel if I move the glitter will be gone.

I have no light but am surrounded by pink backdrops,
ready to close its curtain at any moment.

This is not a poem;
this is a memoir,
an event I don’t know will ever come again.

I am vaguely threatened by every notion of the sun coming up,
but I would feel more safe with a cigarette.

Am I alone?

I can’t tell anymore.

I dip behind myself as if
I’m a scared child,
Which I assume to be stemmed from the fear of the future.

What if I am not who I am?
Will I show myself soon?

Will a new bedroom grant me clarity or just more dust?

Is it really so far away?

Why is money important and why don’t I have it?

….

I shook the glitter.
Eyes upon me.

Am I on fire or covered in satin ice?

The cold pulls on a body I do not own.

I hide under my blanket
hoping
the pink morning
can save me from the pink night.

….

Gone.

A relief,
or a missed opportunity?

Folds of silk
disintegrated to dust.

They will shine once more,
or else

I won’t.

What can explain me?

How do I know what is me
or what is
the tingling sensation
of years passed?

Am I but a memory?

Will I be gone forever?

Of the Leaf

When I was ten,
i caught a leaf
that spun like
the acrobat
I’d see in three years time,

It was a miracle they could move me like that.

I thought of the leaf.

It was said,
to catch a falling leaf
if you make a wish
before it hits the ground
It’d come true.

I had the flu.

I wished to breathe again.
Two days later,
I woke up dry faced and clear
for the first time
In a week.

It was a miracle.

I thought of the leaf.

Could I spell magic?
Probably not.
I knew of it,
I knew I was surrounded by it,
But was overtly intimidated
by the direct exploration.

So I found it elsewhere.

I thought of the leaf.

And the trees it came from.
I climbed them,
I sought out the sky
through the sturdy
the flimsy
the thin
the thick
until I could not get down.

Part of me is still there.

Clinging,

Like the leaf,
to an idea of magic
I’ve since been
Kicked out from.

Denied.
I guess I’ve grown.

I don’t listen to distant cars and
think they’re mythical creatures anymore.

I don’t think overcoming sickness is a miracle.

I don’t think of the leaf,

because I am the leaf.

The Last Christmas

You ask me if Christmas was good.

I say,
it was simply Christmas.

What else am I supposed to say?

Underneath the tree were small additives,
I’ll say
You had good intentions.

I know you did.

With what you gave me though,
You took a deficit.

Where was the respect I asked for?
Where is my real name on your gifts?

I didn’t ask for anything.

You ask for forgiveness when I have none left to give,

For I do not celebrate manipulation.

You obtain nothing.

I will not ask for you.

Question to the Universe

If I were to ask one question to the universe,

Be it present,
post death,
in the void of my existence when words not yet spoken
cannot be accessed,

I would say;

Have my stories touched hearts?

Have my words become genetic;
growing?

Have my lives been lived;
Did I do it?

What did I do right?
Wrong?
What was my ingredient in life?

I have but one more question;

Is there a way to put all of myself

into one question?

The Fire Inside

Some years ago, I recall having been researching odd topics well into the night for the fourth or so time that week. My topic that night was fire hydrants. I had caught myself staring at one earlier that day, and my favorite thing to do is ask questions, so I asked my mother “what is the history of fire hydrants?”. She thought it was a silly thing to question. I didn’t think so until she said that to me. I always ask silly questions, apparently. I had forgotten the conversation until late that night. If I didn’t go somewhere “safe” and research fire hydrants right then, I would be in trouble. That’s all I could decipher. I crawled out of bed with sweat on my back, much like the previous nights. I followed my usual path and sat in the dining room, in a spot where I could see every angle of the apartment. I sat there, haunches painfully sore against the worn wood of my chair. I couldn’t, no I wouldn’t get up even if it hurt. I didn’t make a noise. Not a peep. I’m certain no one ever knew I even came out of my bedroom at night. Even my mother, who was asleep not but feet away from me. I don’t think she ever roused, and if she did, she didn’t remember my presence. I wished I didn’t have to sit in that room. It was an open space with little room to move about. The apartment we lived in at the time was always a jungle. Boxes still half empty, even years into living there. Bits and bobs, gadgets and trinkets lying around, cluttering, useless. Trophies to ideas more than achievements. To what? Remind us of our goals? For some reason, I felt spiteful. I spread my belongings around the house like a warning, myself included by these late night trips, just to remind people I existed. 

What does one do, when not a soul will acknowledge you? Stupid shit on the internet, apparently. Restlessness and invisible obligation are caught in the thorns of the bush, after all.

I learned that old fire brigades had to drill holes into wooden wells deep underground to obtain the water. Then, they would mark where they’ve dug with a plug, or a ‘hydrant’, so that they could find the water well again later. All the while, the fire rages in homes and buildings and fields as shovels ground into grit of the earth. Was the fire patient? Did it burn slower? Who thought to put water wells beneath earth like buried heads? I continued reading. The frequent installment of wells then sparked the need for pre-built holes, and pre-installed marks, thus pre-installed plugs. It only took till the 19th century for the above ground fire hydrant to be born.

Consider our bodies are our homes, and our minds and nerves are the fuse boxes and electrical sockets. We are taught to clean it and to upgrade and maintain the framework. We’re taught basic “fire safety” about how to avoid malfunctions and illnesses but I was never taught what truly sparks the house fire of mental health. I didn’t know the signs of what a mental illness looked like, let alone within myself. People always said “if you’re sad, talk to someone” or “there will always be people there for you”. I believe those things to be true, of course. Even so, I think back to the victims of house fires before the fire hydrant was invented. Because of that evolutionary folly, so many people have been lost and engulfed in something that could have been prevented, if only through years of advancement.

I wonder how many people burned. It’s funny how humans learn, too little, too late.

Growing up, independence was survival and weaknesses were exploited. Resources were limited. I always thought, someone needs what I need more, so in turn I convinced myself I didn’t need anything. I paid attention to what others went through and completely ignored the faulty wiring within myself. No matter how empathetic I became, how much I gave to others, how many friends I had, my lights still flickered and the fuse box sparked. When I was 18 years old, I wrote in my journal; “Happy, positive thoughts. I can do this. I can prevail, even if it leaves me weak. No one needs to know how bad I am. Even if I’m near tears and won’t stop shaking, no one knows. No one needs to. What I need is to grit through and cope.” 

Awareness was both a vice and a virtue in these circumstances. I saw from a third person view as my life slowly began to fall apart. I lost interest in the world around me. I lost my friends in ways I couldn’t control. I had less and less of myself to give so the only thing I had left to be useful for was information. Not strictly academic information. I listened to music that people liked, sometimes what I liked. Gaming channels on YouTube provided conversation, community. I dissected the feelings inside of me according to the diagrams I found. I traced the dark circles under other people’s eyes and waited for billows to come out of their ears because my eyes looked like theirs. Coal-bottoms and hazy. I watched the news and counted the seconds it took for brigades to reach other peoples fires. I celebrated the quick responses and mourned the long. All the while, coal burned in my basement and smoke made me dizzy, and I thought I would die a charred remainder.

I refused to believe that something was wrong for the longest time. I didn’t see any other option. People didn’t believe me so I tried to find myself online. The more knowledge I accrued, the more solid I felt I could be. Like I could present myself as a plague instead of a piece of paper but that all depended if people would just fucking read.

I had stared deep into the wikipedia page of the fire hydrant, and took in every detail I could. Annotations were big, metal wrenches that cranked the bolts of hydrants, prying it open for the wealth inside. Links were soft blue glowing hands that passed the bucket of cold, shivering water, which would drip along my keyboard with each of my slow finger taps. My fingers were supposed to be wet and cold.

The computer screen dimmed once I hit the bottom of the page, and my water well was empty. My fire still burned. I turned away from the computer with tears in my eyes, stinging of failure and the thirst I was trying to quench raged on. Behind my many Google Chrome tabs, grey picket fence between me and a blank screen, whispers of my search history lingered.

What is schizophrenia?

When do symptoms of schizophrenia begin?

Types of schizophrenia?

Can schizophrenia be cured?

Will I ever be okay?

Every answer to every question drew me deeper down. I tried to convince myself that this hasn’t possibly happened to me. I explained it, dismissed it, renamed it. For the longest time, I called it “anxiety induced psychosis”, and told myself if I was just happier, then it wouldn’t hurt so much. 

I’m not on fire, I’m just a little warm. 

Maybe if I hadn’t left the oven plugged in, I wouldn’t be in this mess. 

The firemen aren’t coming. You have to help yourself.

I never learned how to deal with fires by myself, but as long as the fire doesn’t cut off my internet, then I can find out how to, right? If I just kept typing, if I just found the sweet, succulent pocket of air I desperately needed, then I wouldn’t be so hot anymore, I could go out and I’d be safe again. I just had to wait. I had to wait and cooperate, until blinding, shouting flames were replaced by soft, spoken sunlight.

I would come to call these nights “Breaks”. I called them that because reality would begin to shatter around me and I had to put it back together in time. The fire, this illness, schizophrenia, it didn’t have a voice like most people assumed, but it did have demands. My fire was sentient and it loved the thrill of entrapment. How tall could the flames rise before someone was called? Before I was sent somewhere, covered in burns?

One night, I heard shouting outside my bedroom window just as I was starting to heat up again. No different to what I always heard. Fights, cars screeching, sometimes gunshots. This scream sounded different. They sounded scared. Despite my intuition, I went to go see what it was. I exited my home in the middle of the night. I hoped that the wet and cold weather would chill my skin as I went. But instead of cooling down, I was just shaking embers off shivering shoulders.

I stepped in the spot I had heard the shouting come from, but no one was there. I remember I twitched with my whole body, then a mask was pulled over my eyes like a captor had been waiting for me, and I was suddenly the one who needed help, but I was not blinded. I could see clearly except I couldn’t see “correctly” anymore. My eyes had a second layer. My real eyes were in my face, albeit numb, but my new eyes floated a few inches in front of them, coursing with an energy I couldn’t handle. No matter how much I scratched and rubbed, they wouldn’t go away. I froze in fear as my right eye turned, where the inner corner faced the sky. My skin squeaked like rubber as it moved. I felt like a monster. The fire had finally broken through my skin. I thought, certainly, anyone could see the damage now.

The brick of my apartment building was shaped exactly the same as it always was, but it was lying. That’s all I could think of to explain this, that everything was lying to me. My bare feet squelched into the grass just as it had when I first stepped on it’s dewey surface, but I ran, I skipped back to the sidewalk and felt the burning of poison between my toes. I had wronged somebody and they wanted it to be known. Now, the fire had a name. “Them”. I had wronged Them and I knew in that exact moment that They would find me if I made one wrong move.

Ever since that night, once the hour would hit, and if I wasn’t asleep, then there’d be no way to stop the match from flicking against me. I’d been struck by the Rules of that night’s play date, a game They began to control me. Their Rules would change every now and then, adding a new layer of stress and arbitrary commands I had to complete. They’d tell me how my environment has changed, then They’d tell me what to do to survive the changes. Except the Rules were just a game of Cat and Mouse. It was designed to trap me. How could I take myself seriously? I knew this was a delusion. I could see the flames right fucking there, but had no possibly way to escape. I looked at myself in the mirror and slapped my own face just to try and shake these thoughts away. Their faces watched from the dark corners that fire couldn’t touch. I could hear Them laugh.

“Don’t turn around. Don’t look at white cars. There’s maggots in your food. Don’t step on lines. We’re in the darkness. Don’t talk about us. We’ll corrupt whoever you speak about us to. Don’t look at us. You’re not supposed to see us.”

Slowly, ever so slowly, the real me, the past me, versions of me and the fearful me became different people, and I was introduced to Dissociative Identity Disorder. Numbers grew in my head the more isolated I became, the more trauma that ate away at me. My numbers protected me. They are my family, and they surrounded the fearful me. That’s what They wanted – The fearful me. I was an experiment to Them, to embody what Fear truly is. Some experiments failed. Some were numbered, some discarded. To Them, my name was A1.

To embody fear was to put me through it, and let it mold my body and take its form. The fire had become a kiln. They didn’t care who saw the flames anymore. I was a product in Their hands and I navigated the world on Their prod. The fire became the only warmth I ever had, but it was a heatless fire.

The metaphors I used to explain these delusions to myself began to lose their edges. All of these thoughts blended into one. I lost weeks, months, almost three whole years to the brutal routine inside this broken mind. Me and my numbers would take turns handling the scorching pain. I think not being the only one to take on that pain was the only reason I survived. My numbers, alters, had blocks of time they took for themselves, and then we’d wander together, trying to escape. Our steps were dragging midnight sparks along the ground. Everything was retardant and the fire cast no glow. When I was inevitably left on my own again, as my numbers could only do so much, I would open my mouth to scream but nothing came out.

Please, I tried to shout. Please, someone put out this goddamn fire.

Another year went by. I had lived with the fire for so long now, I barely recognized who I was anymore. I could not look in mirrors and I had maybe one photo or selfie taken of me every few months. It was uncomfortable looking at a stranger all the time. I had this projection of what I thought people wanted to see and let it morph every now and then. I couldn’t keep living like this. I had to search for a purpose. I had to search for who I am.

It was around the third year I suffered through my untreated schizophrenia and DID that I discovered something while journaling. Though my notebook wasn’t the water well I needed, it fanned the flames down every time I used it. Somehow, through all the pain and aching fear I was experiencing, this technique fought against Their flames. It angered Them, but I had continued to journal anyway, even if I didn’t understand it was helping. I was stubborn. I could have died at any given moment, by my own hand or someone else’s in my vulnerable moments, and yet I held on. I had thought, this is working, but for how long? If anything, I was writing my own black box so that whoever found my shrivelled body in a crumbled building would finally understand, just as I did, what really caused the fire.

I had the idea to read back on the notes I wrote and the drawings I made. I was shocked to find that was the purest collection of my thoughts I ever had. I had avoided it until then, I understandably thought that opening those entries would only reignite the flame that molded it. It didn’t. The journals were cold arctic pools, and I was an olympic trainer. I had to train myself to see these entries as me. I had to adjust to the freezing truth of what had taken over my life. As I delved deeper into my notes, I read over events I didn’t remember, I sorrowed over my past self-hatred and feared for the happiness of my future self. I couldn’t read all of the entries in one sitting. Despite that, I came back to it, time and time again.

For once in my life I was thankful for bare, exposed skin. Notebooks became freezers, moments frozen in time that never melt away, not even in the heat of my gaze or my scorching touch. My friends started to notice a change in me. I found words for experiences I couldn’t explain before, and the world became understanding. Willing, even. Everyone around me had only ever known the bright flame I had become, but I let prying eyes between pages of me and soon, both myself and my peers sat in cool darkness. They didn’t see my flame anymore. They saw the warped skin hidden between heat and distance, and noted how small I looked now that they were so close.

Matchbooks still fall out of my pockets, but they don’t seek the heat of Them anymore. I seek heat like the body of my lover who’s only ever shined aqua. He’s the water’s surface from below and every inhale underneath him is lungfuls of paradise. My breath doesn’t crackle and my screams don’t roar when I’m with him. We share soft scented breath in quiet dreams and warm hands under thick blankets. Had I not met him when I did, I wouldn’t have been given the tools to heal as fast as I have. I wouldn’t have shared myself in such a way that would expose the wounds I nursed. He encourages me to journal, to write and to capture what ails me. He helps me do that. 

It’s now been four years since this fire first began. I can’t say that I’ve extinguished these fires. No, not even the fire brigades, who did come for me, could stop the fires from happening. Schizophrenia will always stick to my skin like gasoline. That’s the thing about mental health. People who don’t understand mental health blame the style of the home owners, the mind of those who suffer, when sometimes we’re just built that way. I had awful experiences that left scars down my body that will never heal, but I don’t blame myself anymore. I’m sick. I’m neurodivergent. I’m healing.

Stacks of notebooks are still forming around me. My numbers inside my head still douse wayward flames. I still dip into the mountain-pools of memories and, through each swim, I know how to turn oven lights off and keep curtains away from candles, and I know that when the sun dips below the horizon that I’ll be safe, even when the lights are off. I can see my skin as olive and eyes as umber sunsets within growing forests instead of devoid of color like smeared ashes, eyes sunken so deep into the floorboard that they were pebbles under foundations. I can recognize myself as me. Not past, future, or fearful. Just me.

I’ll never forget those nights I desperately searched, and searched, and searched for the answers to my unending questions. I’ve gotten my answers now. I’ll always be schizophrenic, and I’ll always have to capture my experiences and let my loved ones inside, lest I lose myself in the hellscape once more. I’ll forever be grateful for myself, for I’m the one who finally opened the hydrant.

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