synesthesia

I think I have an odd kind of synesthesia. I feel words. When I write it is like sculpting. It feels like motion. I feel like I am running my hands over a scultural form. I can tell when the piece is too flat. I can feel the rise and fall of it. I can feel it when I am reading too which is why I get so angry when the words I am reading clang flatly. It is a ride and if the ride is not fluid I am jerked out of the story.

I know this now because I went on anti-depressants last week. I took them for 5 days. They stopped me from sleeping. I broke out in pimples on my nose and forehead. I sweated terribly and smelled funny. But the worst of it was I wrote words without feeling them at all. They were all flat on the page. I had no way of telling if they were good words or bad words. I was removed from the dance of them. I couldn't feel them in three dimensions any more.

Last time I went on the drugs I didn't write for a year.  Now I think I know why. What is the point of writing flat words on a page. If the dance is gone or if you are removed from it, why bother to try to dance at all?

I have stopped taking the drugs. I know I have been close to the edge. I know I have been worrying my friends and bothering my acquaintances with my odd paranoia. I have been thinking about the long sure plummet of late and that is a concern. But what is the point of living if you are vaguely happy. What is the point of working if you cannot feel the words.

Maybe it is not synesthesia but if not it is something terribly similar. Whatever it is, it allows me to wrap my arms around the body of the work an bend it into the most pleasing shapes. It is like being with a responsive lover. It is like the best kind of kissing. I am not yet ready to abandon this for the safety of sanity. I have come off the drugs. Bear with me. We may be up for some hard times. yet.

flirt

You are playing with her. Playing as a child plays, full of joy and wonder. There is just the bubble of you and her, she giggles and moves her arm, you lean towards it, chasing. This is kiss chasey only on a micro scale, here in the bar surrounded by the rest of us. You are just flirting. Both of you partnered off to other people, but for this second there is only the pure childish joy of this moment.

You are fun to be around.

I hear you say it and it throws me. I am here with everyone else and I am alone. I do not flirt. I am not flirted with. I am not fun to be around at all. You lean in to chase her arm and I withdraw. I am close enough to touch and yet I am not touched. I could be chased but I remain heavy and static, a statue made of brass, untouchable.

Little stop

Little stop, my grandmother used to say. Now a little stop. I think of this when I place it on my tongue and swallow. I don't feel quite right, but then I wasn't quite right before. This unbalanced feeling is perhaps a leveling.

1.30am. A ridiculous time to be so awake, awake enough to work and yet with nothing to offer. The pounding in my skull is the sound of the world emptying out. My palms are sweaty. There is a faint odour.

I have been taking the drugs for three days. I can still see the slide of the knife into my eye. I can still imagine the cold O of the mouth of a gun. I can do myself harm, but what is the point when I have no passion for it. I no longer weep because I am all dried out and I am thirsty as a dog in summer.

I sit on the couch, sleepless, wide eyed. I sit and know the vast emptiness of eternity and my place within it. Only now eternity is shrinking, day by day, closing up on itself till, next week, or the one after, I will walk down a small street into a small city and it will feel like everything there is.