Just a thought.

By Kristen Gregg, Edited by Meg Marzella

Untitled by Andrew Lackland

Dave Bayley’s voice, to an audience of one: “I can’t take this place, no I can’t take this place, I just want to go somewhere I can get some space…”

A mirror, waving in front of my image with me inside it, slides to the psychedelic pop. My image is staring at me, standing on the outside, existing only up to my navel, filling up with water above its head and breathing because images do not have lungs. I am spinning, spinning like the top of a pill bottle cap, spinning until I pop it off because the child safety lock is broken. Who put them on iron pills anyways?

I know I am not stupid—I am not dumb—I am just guilty, but what to do with this guilt? It is but a temporary label, and I am but a temporary being with limited time, time I must spend wisely. But I cannot be sure how to use it. How to be kind, how to be appreciative, how to understand someone, how to understand myself, and how to not die are perhaps the best of questions to ponder when pondering this. Wash your hands. Breathe.

I am scared of what potentially lives inside every human being. I am most afraid of what is inside me. So much so, I think I have thought myself into ignorance. I am afraid to speak but I shout anyway. I hear that is bravery. I hear my family, my friends, strangers on the Internet typing and yelling all the things they believe but have been too scared to say. I want to be brave, and I know to be brave is to be afraid, but I am afraid that I am not afraid enough.

I think that is the over-thinker in me, meta thinking about meta thinking, to what power can my thoughts take me, must they be squared, cubed, multiplied before I recognize that my mind is running itself tireless.

Why do I scare myself with these horrid thoughts? I know the ones that are truly horrific are sitting in my brain, orchestrating this cacophony of overthinking in a way to cope. Am I truly coping or am I making myself sadder? Is this healthy? My thoughts have always liked to linger in the darkest spots and tangle themselves into stories I never thought I would step into and yet here I am. Who am I to think I can paint others’ lives, who am I to write? I do not know why I write, I know I like to write for myself (and what a selfish reason of them all). I cannot tell if I am self-compassionate or narcissistic or too hard on myself—each sentence, each phrase, each word tells me the opposite of each other.

I am not sure if I am alive or dreaming or in hell, the yellow light in the corner of my room is glowing and I am yellow like those alternative films. Reality is too real that I cannot rip myself from the present. I am trying to write my way out of my room but I am confined, my eyes are locked on the pink of my boyfriend’s borrowed sweatshirt, my body tells me my legs are crossed and leaving a dent in my bed for the twenty days I remain here. I can see my slippers on my floor with their backs smushed down, conquered, submissive. I am a person with two morals, one in each hand and I do not know which one is worthy.

I think I made the idea somewhere along the way of growing up that emotions are powerless and useless when in fact they are full of information. I can feel the small twinge of curiosity within myself when I cry or I become angry. It is not one of cold, scientific, calculated curiosity but a childish one, a wondrous one, a curious feeling accompanied by compassion. It is warmth and it is asking me to give some shelter for awhile, perhaps I am making myself a temporary home now to breath out these tears and fears and worries and they are spilling out of me as words but they are not wet nor slippery but abstract and solid and plasma and the iron from stars that I take with my breakfast every morning.

I am alive, I am meant to live, I am whole, and I am also hole, not to be filled but empty with purpose. I am a hole in a semi-permeable membrane, allowing the necessary materials to pass through. I am an entrance and a guardian to what ideas and doctrines are allowed to run through my brain cells with rampant curiosity.

I use “I” quite a lot I have realized but since I am the subject of this ramble it only makes sense that I give myself the responsibility of “subject” in a sentence. I will not make it passive voice and hide myself from where I truly stand. I am an author and I am also the sentence. Where does one begin and the other end? If only I could type forever, the letters and morphemes and phonemes and words on the screen running electricity through the keyboard to my fingertips that are pulsed by the very blood that touches my heart and keeps my brain alive long enough to connect my thoughts to my fingers to the keyboard to the words that are on the page. But the page isn’t even real unless I write, but if I do that there is too much distance. Time is a thief—it steals all the mistakes that appear while I try to keep up with my fast stream of consciousness and splatter it onto the page. I do not think more properly with pen and paper but even more carelessly because I try to think of how to write it and even then I do not care, and when I do you see me scratch it out but it is too infrequent to be considered genuine. And in the span of time I try to think of how to phrase it the thought has already passed, the feeling gone, and I am left bewildered. Thoughtless is a trait I find myself wanting to ascribe myself but the existence of this page yells otherwise.

The world is contained to my room and even smaller, to the music in my ears and the space between myself and the computer where maybe my center of gravity would float if I were to be standing rather than lounging. But for all I know gravity is as real as the words on this disconnected space. It is as real as the voice in your head. It is only, really, a thought.