It is late summer, my favourite season. The air smells like earth, and isn't polluted by people, thus I am spared the burden of verbal articulation. The grass itches the skin of my buttocks, I'm sitting in a field. I don’t know how long I've been sitting and watching, my mind is miraculously still — I am able to exist within the timeless smoothness of things. It's strangely straightforward. The orange prairie wind does not avoid me, the grass doesn't seem offended, I am included in my surroundings. I did not ask permission to leave the Institution, nor did I inform anyone of my plans, so I am resolving to stay forever: or until someone notices, and bursts my crystal afternoon to collect me back to the Institution. I’m not distracted by that possibility; indifference is a pleasant side effect from all my treatments. The sun is making a minuscule transit towards the horizon. I am sitting, still as a stone. I am not using the sun as an excuse to think about time - I am not concerned with time - I am just watching.

 

✦

 

At some point in my life, my brain had become unbearably heavy - a boulder atop frail anatomy. Memories spiralled and proliferated becoming grotesque conspiracies. My thoughts were so overgrown they blocked out the sun, and always seemed to lead me to the foot of a treacherous mountain, and never to a meadow or a field. Never to a resting place, always to an insurmountable issue.  My own mind circled me into these traps. My own mind expected what it could not provide. Even within myself, my earnest labours were insufficient. How does one escape this dread, which violates from all directions? I could not. However my mind wore flat, which made things easier. I stoped making requests or harbouring expectations, which also made things easier. I became dull, indifferent, and sealed.  They couldn’t find a solution, and neither could I; so I became dull, indifferent, and sealed. 

 

A ceiling has been installed between me and my Sky. There are specific moments in my life where I recall this happening (the sky was blotted out, and I was shut in) and it was also many small things, which I began to notice less and less. A steady encroachment of ink around my window. I did it to myself too, I also tried to use force to solve it. Sometimes I felt so grotesque I forgot the consequences and spat Ink onto my own firmament, closing myself in.  From where I am now, I suppose it doesn’t matter how it happened - but I just mean to say that there was a time when I looked forward to spring

 

✦

​

Stranded within the self. Condemned to a solitary island. Sometimes I panicked and tried frantically to break out, like a squirrel- who, by a collection of unintentional choices, finds itself astray in a department store. Other times I became immobile beneath the unsolvable things. This was more pleasant than my frenetics, although neither tactic delivered me. I adapted, and learned to favour dullness and immobility. I’m not sure why -for what purpose and to what end- but I had the impulse to survive, and this is how I managed. It is still grotesque to be shut in the doorless room of myself, though somehow I find comfort by knowing it’s consistent. 

 

✦ 

 

Once a man touched me, touched the outside of me, and he told me I was lovely and he’d like to go on another date. Then I scavenged to find a crack in the wall of this dark and edgeless place, some hole he could enter through, and light a candle. In the end, I could not bend the circumstances. Soon he realized my machines were fried, reality surfaced like oil on the pool of my potential salvation, and he stopped coming by. That was the only time I was “wanted”. I don’t expect to be desired now - but for some reason, I have stayed alive. I recall

his clean eyes and pimpled face.

 

✦ 

 

When they first took me away my father cried and my mother didn’t. My brother was too young to be contaminated by that sort of darkness, protected by that shield of innocence that seems to protect children under seven. The doctors who collected me were old and resentful. Empathy had deserted their eyeballs; thirsty, flat landscapes. They no longer saw these afflictions as solvable -my sort of affliction- but they did not tell us that. The dog sat near to the furnace watching, her heart knew something too. My bowels were filled with marbles and I had a terrible need to vomit, but from the outside I remained neutral. 

 

Now our kitchen is filled with people trying to solve something, and apparently it is Me; the thing which needs to be solved. Our kitchen, in which I’ve had a few scattered memories of warmth and unity, has become so bleak and flawed all of the sudden, even the light is slimy and repulsive. It is about three in the afternoon and I have never seen the kitchen so revolting. I can’t bear to see it, so I fixate on a piece of lace that's frayed from the hem of my sleeve, and twist it madly. My isolation feels like food poisoning, but instead of ejecting itself it stays in, seething. For the last time, I experienced the creaking melody of the floorboards. 

 

✦

 

I felt betrayed by everything that had ever held me. I felt betrayed by God who insisted I needed to live and crammed me into this lonesome unsolvable story. I felt betrayed by myself because I did not, and could not operate properly. 

 

✦

 

When I walked with the doctors to their car it was spring, there were hills of brown snow chewing at yellow sod. Noises escaped through the throats of ducks, I heard them on the other side of my brain. There were layers of tulle pulled in front of the cold sun. I smelled life dormant in the earth, a smell of potential and promise, which jabbed me with envy and grief. My thoughts from then on were abstract and illogical: I thought about a song I learned in choir when I was a girl, I thought of Paris France, which I had only seen in pictures and hadn’t thought much about before that strange moment; and I noticed, with a peculiar distance, that crocuses were blooming. Then I left, and nobody spoke. I mostly miss the dog and my brother. Now there are teams of people involved in solving my equation. People with stiff laundered uniforms, repulsive complexions, and payrolls. They are all trying to discover how to make my despair more convenient for others. 

 

✦

 

I am still seated in the field. I suppose they haven’t noticed my absence yet, or they are searching the wrong places. I don’t care; I will not contaminate this moment with intellect or emotion. The sky is sloping and the sun is bowing to me and my scenery. The grasshoppers are singing with the rise of night. It all seems to include me. The sinking sun is a hole to the other side.  It seems like a good idea to stay here until I’m dismissed from myself, then I will crawl through the hole of the sun.  I look forward to that- replacing my brain with a cloud, or just pure frequency, and never again stepping foot in a square building.