Like your skin is sewn into the bed. Bones replaced with metal, and you wish you remembered how to cry. Outside your door is a mountain and it screams at you. But you can’t move, and there’s something inside eating itself. It hurts to think but you’re not the one doing it anymore, just some dull hum of words like an old brick TV left on, an eternal newscast of dread. It’s a spell, some dead-end maze.
How does one escape? Do you even want to? Do you want? The stagnation grows in itself, accumulation like dead things behind a dam. Indulgent misery like vultures to carcasses. But you know how this goes, some part wanting to prove yourself right in the nothingness, that sweet oblivion how she sings to you. This weight is a whirlpool and it’s dragging you down.
You interrupt the newscaster. “Excuse me, I have something to say.” His dribble of nonsensical mumbled half-affirmations halts. Silence like falling, inertia like running in a dream.
“Is this your limit?” You drop the question in your mind like a coin in a wishing well, like poking a sleeping monster. The internal orchestra of lies stops, curling quiet. Little egoic tentacles rise up. These little spells you’ve cast on yourself that keep you sewn to the bed must be cut and cauterized with action. The mind, body, and soul must be synchronized to sever the spells.
You wiggle your big toe, the first act of defiance. “This is not my limit.” Upward thoughts swarm in like little troops to battle the spells. “This bed, this place will not be my tomb.” You pull, spit, strain and pray. Ripping the stitches. Rise up, a crawl, to a walk. A little voice: “Run you fool, run from this place.”
If you’re breathing there is a small flame in you, perhaps just embers, a fire deadened by the waters of sorrow. But there is no place too dark that can’t be exhumed by the light. The flame is fanned with movement. No matter how large that screaming mountain is outside, it will stay above you without the climb. Even if the steps are small they must be taken. Your limbs are yours to take back. Cede no ground, this is a war to be won cell by cell.
There is no hell that can’t be transformed into heaven. But the transformation is through kinesis. You are here to usher yourself through the darkness. A vision of you bathed in light at the top of the mountain beckons you. In order for the topography of anguish to transform you must watch yourself become. Action precedes thought, this is the important paradigm you must remember. In movement your body is showing your mind how to think. Movement breaks the chain, the phonetic loops, the loops of despair. The sorrow will ooze out of your pores, washed out with sweat and blood. Whether you stay chained there to the bed or begin to move you will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But remember that movement begets movement, generative momentum. With this little shift you step out of your thoughts into your body and then usher your thoughts up to you with action. Leaning forward and falling up. Seizing control, shifting to someone who is happening to life, not someone life is happening to.
You can only lie around and bleed for so long. Get up. Cauterize the wounds, then turn the scars into medals. In the midst of hell it tells you that you are weak, but a hell in hindsight will inform your soul of all the strength it possessed to get through it. Turn this kingdom of cold dead ash into a landscape of burning desire. You owe it to yourself to climb that screaming mountain my dear friend, and when you finally arrive at the summit, having washed the ashes from your psyche and healed into someone you’ve never been before, you’ll find yourself staring at the sun with a new pair of eyes and a fuller soul; the light glistening off your blistered skin.
The crescendo is palatable. The stirring it creates became a warrior’s row.