Cherry Waves

I'll swim down. Would you?

Sometimes, things happen, and I am unsure how to move. Sometimes, I become locked up in some impenetrable room with no windows, and no matter how intelligent I think I am, I can’t seem to find out why I’m stuck there or why I can’t get out of it. Something becomes locked up, and language cannot reach me. I become a strong room for something both stuck and courageous. Lately, my strong room has grown teeth of steel.

I went home a week ago, thinking I would be able to rest my mind from whatever force compelled it to move. I thought it would finally still. It did not. Usually, I arrive and find that the ghosts in the cupboards make faces –they’re either wincing or they’re angry. It depends on the season.

In the summer, the ghosts take on the shape of things tainted by sunlight, but not in a good way. Tainted like how water changes paper once it’s wet. In the winter, they become breaths of wind, whispering about the house, making something out of the silence. They sit in the closets. I find them grouped together by the faucet in my bedroom’s bathroom. They watch me, but they have no eyes, so I don’t understand how I feel them staring anyway.

Last week, I realized that I was neither lonely nor cold. Just angry. I had gone from being some kind of numbing sensation to something that now scorched with anger. Something inside me snapped open, like a wound bursting its stitches apart. A blank canvas was suddenly alight with color. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how tightly I’ve been coiled since I left; how tight my hands have been.

My shoulders are all tense. My eyebrows are all heavy. Sometimes, I feel like I am bigger than everything, and it makes my head hurt. When I visit old friends, there is no faint remnant of euphoria from no longer being afraid. All I’ve realized is how tight I am, how taut my skin is. All I’ve realized is how much people are noticing. Sometimes when I laugh, the sound feels too sharp in my mouth. I feel like when I speak, my words cut thin slices into my gums. I can’t figure out where my feet end when I walk.

I’m a chord too tightly strung, a thread too tightly held. What, exactly, am I being held by? I’m not sure either. Even sleep feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t work. I tell myself I just need to rest, that all this tension is nothing but the result of my developing caffeine addiction and the many assignments that cross my desk every morning. I keep telling myself to just put one foot in front of the other; that being in motion is better than being suspended in it.

But when I’m outside and too overwhelmed to listen to music, everything feels like static against my skin. I hear ringing in my ears sometimes. It feels like I’m always rushing, like I’m the only one moving where everyone else is still. Sometimes, things feel like stop motion. Sometimes, they feel like rainfall. I’m afraid that if someone touches me, I might flinch. The light doesn’t pass through me anymore. When did I become mass? Where did all that lightness go? I shouldn’t have taken it for granted. Now I’m all weight, forced to carry it.

One night, I walked a mile in the rain and wanted the water to unwind me. I waited to be unraveled like tendrils of ribbon falling to the floor, but it didn’t work. I wait and watch for the birds. Sometimes, they’re right outside my window, as clear as they can be, and I can’t hear them. I walk into the shower to wash the heat off my skin, plucking wet petals off of paper, and by the time I get out, the tension comes back.

I keep telling myself to move. Walk. Read. Think. Move. Walk. Think. Think. Think. Pick up and get up and move. Again and again. Think better. Sharpen this. Sharpen that.

A few seasons ago, I remember being nothing but dried silence, secretly wishing to disappear. Now, I don’t feel that way anymore. My nose is red, and I feel like frostbite, and sometimes, I’ll be on the bus and feel like it’s unlikely that anything else is moving and not just me.

I used to feel like an open-ended ocean. I feel like I’m coming up against the barrier soon. The water keeps splashing, and the waves are getting bigger. Is it a storm or is it natural? Is the stillness better or the forward movement? I feel like I can breathe underwater these days, and like I’m not desperately fighting to stay above the surface. For the love of God, I can’t stop moving.

I feel everything. It’s the universe experiencing itself. It’s an all-black painting suddenly bursting with color. It’s like my pupils are constantly dilated. It’s strange that all this anger feels less like a shield and more like natural instinct, like when you bump against your funny bone and watch it move before you think. It feels like when a supernova explodes. I feel too big for my body, my limbs too small for whatever is swirling within me. The entire ocean is me. I feel like I crushed the universe into grains by attempting to extinguish it, and it only came back bigger. I’m being flung, or I’m the one flinging everything around this time. I can’t tell. Even when I close my eyes and feel the sun, everything feels like windfall. Like rain falling faster and faster and faster. Like I am the one moving the tides, and they’re clutched to my ankles like ribbons. I can hardly feel the ground, but I’m tired, still.

I lay against my bed, bent over from the waist, hands reaching for the floor. Being upright feels like too much. Looking down feels less heavy, but just as restless. When people speak to me, it feels like their voices echo and the wind carries their cadence. They sound too far away. I say nothing, when in reality I have too much to say and wouldn’t know where to begin. Even though I’m not running, the pace feels the same. My hands itch for something. I could walk for hours, and it wouldn’t matter; I’d still feel the energy around me. There’s too much to do, and I don’t know where to start. I cut my hair, and it’s not like I hate it, but it doesn’t mean as much to me as it used to. I have emptied myself; left the blank slate. I chose to be nothing to be everything. It doesn’t feel wrong, but it doesn’t feel right either. I can choose to destroy. I can also build. I feel like the river that eroded the Grand Canyon, only in seconds instead of centuries. When I walk, I leave indents on the ground. I leave proof of existence in the rain, like when you step into snow. It would be fine if I weren’t so tired. If I weren’t so flighty. It would be fine if I could make it make sense. There is too much form now. I don’t even know how to begin to shape it.

The cards say this is what I’m supposed to feel, that I can celebrate now, but I can’t. I’m a lullaby carved in rust. I’m something like a baptism and a confession. I am not so slow anymore. I do not stagnate in the sun. I possess even the shade. I am in the whirl of the world. I am neither happy nor sad nor grateful.

My grandparents always tell me to pray so that I can hold larger things, and so that when dusk settles over the wind, I’ll be able to live with it. The only thing certain in this life, they tell me, is uncertainty. The only thing you can count on is your own effort. Sometimes, when the wind changes direction, I don’t even react. I face wherever it tells me to go. I am like a kid in that way, going wherever the wind tells me.

I don’t know how to explain any of this to any of the people who notice. They watch me walk with caution and still break things. They see me move with light feet and still leave marks on the wood. The ghosts in the house don’t gather at my feet anymore. They hide when I close the cupboards. They shelter in place when I sleep in the living room. Everything else seems to be afraid of me now, and not the other way around.

Is it anger or something else? Is it mass or something less solid? What if it’s both? What if it’s neither? I am small. Finely-built. My speech is too overprecise. My large eyes and dark hair are something startling. I always polish the syllables on the tip of my tongue.

I wonder why I haven’t written anything. I ask if I have made myself too busy to consider picking up a pen. Every answer is a no. I am not avoiding the paper, and it is not that I am afraid of what I might say. But how can you write a phenomenon into paper? How can you explain how things have tipped entirely to one side?

When the day is gone, I find myself sharpening into something capable of cutting. When I cry, it feels punctuated. Pain turns into shapes and colors. It feels like everything is beautiful. If that’s clarity, what kind is it? Is it the kind that makes me realize that love is not what I thought it was, and the world has changed? It feels full, but it hurts at the same time.

The world has changed. I don’t know how to explain it, but it has.