This is a piece that my psychologist prompted me to write about. It was inspired by his new office. It is in an old building with high ceilings that allow for an echo. This made me very uncomfortable. Yes, I am weird.
An echo is a reflection of the voice. The voice is a conduit for the emotions that stir within. An echo is a reflection of emotions. Within my head, there is such traffic that there is no room for an echo. A single emotion will pound its fists on the inside of my brain in a desperate attempt to scream loud enough to resonate within the confines of my skull. Unfortunately, it will usually go unheard. The turmoil of a mass of emotions pleading for attention creates such a tangled jumble of noise that eventually, all I hear is a static.
Every now and then, my mind will tune into a single thought long enough and clearly enough to decipher a single feeling and make sense of it. Often, when my mind attempts this fine tuning, the jumble will interfere. A precise S.O.S tapped out in a cerebral Morse code is quickly hijacked by the mess of dots and dashes that have become ensnared with each other. My message is lost. My emotions are lost. My voice has no clear echo.
The euphoria of nothing is something to be coveted. Once my mind and my brain are empty and quiet enough, my voice can echo. Even if the echo is something that I am afraid to hear…a message from my heart to my mind. My heart screams at my mind to pay attention, to pull itself out of the abyss and bliss of love and protect the rest of my body. On good days, I am able to receive this echo loud and clear. These are the days when the inner turbulence is still and thoughts can linger in peace, or unrest. The most painful feeling is when I am able to process a message that screams to about a love into which I have given myself completely that is destined to fail. And soon.
The most distal aspect of my stomach becomes a vice. The sensation of utter lose creeps up through the rest of my body…my throat catches, my breathing becomes shallow and rapid, my neck stiffens, my eyes swell, my tongue quivers with the onset of tears, my lips part, my voice breaks through with such remorse that it could drown even the hardiest of water dwellers. My words trickle out, echoing the life-consuming depression from within. This is one of the echoes that I dread. In the quiet, it will come and cause unrest.
Perhaps I avoid such stillness so as to avoid this cautionary message that only eviscerates my heart and rips me apart limb from limb. The only euphoric feelings and echoes I have received from within occurred when I lost consciousness. I went from standing, oriented, and alert to falling through the air headed towards the ground. My mind was black. There was nothing but the most pleasant feeling of freedom. In a nihilistic manner, everything was nothing and it was amazing. However hard I strive to achieve that feeling again, I am afraid it will never happen. Unless I force my body back into these specific physical circumstances, which would ultimately be detrimental to my brain. So it is not an option.
Life was so quiet that any hint of emotion could have echoed out of my being and just continued on and on into the void. It was beautiful. Nothing had ever been so clear and so quiet. No fear of what was screaming within to be found there. It was as pristine as a forest under a fresh bed of snow glistening and reflecting the perfectness of a full moon. Untouched. No distortion or twisting of echoes. If I was able to go back to that place, every single emotion would have its own time and own message so that the quiet wouldn’t be as dangerous. Every feeling would be allowed to resonate with perfect pitch, no matter how ugly the information is that is carries.
As I already longingly stated, this is not physically possible unless I want to harm my poor body more than I already have. So, what can I do? Meditate? No, the emotions are too impatient, too powerful, and too chaotic to allow that. This is where my army of Synapse Swallows would be absolutely perfect. Little armor-coated birds to fly through the mess and pick out individual echoes that need to be interpreted and processed. If only! I will have to settle for medications, therapy, inner wars, and jumbled defenses to try and decode all of my echoes and cries as they come screaming to the surface. I never have been comfortable settling.
