It Is This

This is my journal. I am writing, not of my own free will, but under the instructions of my family and therapist, Dr. M. Morrow, because they believe that if I am able to express my daily thoughts in a "constructive manner", I will be able to function as a "normal" human being again one day soon. They are all very worried about me and feel that I need help in coping with my emotions and stray thoughts. I think that therapy is a load of bullshit (am I allowed to swear, doctor?), but what the hell? I will never get them to leave me alone if I do not cooperate.
I hate that word, "cooperate". It makes me think of complacent dummy dolls that do all that they are told to do. It all seems so mundane, sometimes. Go to school, get a job, get married, have children and die. I think of these people as zombies. They follow societal rules, never go outside the lines, play nice and die. Everyone dies. When I die I want to go out knowing that I created a wonderful peice of art without ever coloring inside the lines. Every stroke would be wild and free and passionate, without restraint or fear. That is how my life should be. That is what I want my life to be.

The sign said that it was 8:41 p.m. Outside was dark. The lights illuminating the inside of the bus created clear reflections in the windows, making it seem as if the people inside were floating out alongside the bus. And there were duel reflections, little points of light that used to be headlights and taillights, that played tricks on my eyes.
Two women sat behind me, speaking together in rapid spanish, sometimes breaking off to laugh pointed, spit-fire little laughs.
My stomach churned at each stop as the bus driver hit the breaks and threw us all forward. He drove as if he hated his job and wanted everyone else to suffer for it.
We finally pulled into the Hillsboro Central Transit Center. I gathered up the two bags I had with me, stuffed with clothes and a few books, and hurried out the back door. I was relieved to be off that big, wheezing bus. The transit center was quiet, nearly deserted. I sat on one of the cold, blue metal benches and stared through the windows of the sports bar across the tracks. Only a few bodies filled the chairs in there despite the fact that the Green Bay Packers were playing on the big screen. It looked cold in there.
A familiar bell sounded to my right, rang twice, high and shrill, announcing the arrival of the train that would take me to Portland. The few people that were waiting there with me stood up in anticipation. I remained sitting patiently, not wanting to get up and throw on my bags until the train had pulled up and opened its doors. It was much brighter on the max than it had been on the bus. The yellow lights gave life to a dull pain in the back of my head. I yawned and tried to keep my dinner from escaping. My eyes watered and my vision blurred. I closed them, hoping that my eyelids would soak up any excess tears.
Above me a mechanical women's voice announced each stop and the appropriate doors to exit out of. Her monotonous tone threatened to put me to sleep. I searched for something to keep my mind occupied.
My eyes settled on the baby: its pink face, its big, duumb eyes, still a bright crystal blue, still blessedly unaware of any true suffering, its curled little toothless mouth. That baby projected innocence, a childish naivete I envied and pittied at the same time. I envied its dull happiness. I envied the fact that it still had shelter from the cruel world around it. I had pitty for the child's surprise when age would strip it of its ignorance of youth, when it would be pushed into a harsh reality.
I lifted my eyes to the mother and stifled my surprise when I saw that she was staring back. She had deep blue grim-set, determined eyes that seemed to scream at me, "Don't have children! Save yourself!"
I answered her cry in my head. "I won't. I won't."
From above us came the computerised female voice, announcing yet another stop. The interruption was like a scream ripping through my brain. When the doors opened, woman and baby stepped off, going to wherever mothers and their children go.
I sighed as the doors closed and the train lurched on. My head ached louder as I wondered what sort of life I would choose to lead in five, ten, twenty years. Would I someday have a child of my own? I imagine myself marrying happy and then divorcing, becoming a single mother and attending parent/teacher meetings, joining a book club and sighing to myself as I prepare dinner for my little family, thinking of the past and wishing things had gone differently for me. My stomach squirmed, kicked, fought to be released in protest to that mechanical she-voice drilling monotony into the air.
"NO!", I yelled aloud. I looked around me, curiously, wondering if it had really been me that had yelled. Then, "No." again, as if to reassure myself. The few people sitting around me tried to ignore me, writing me off as another loony on the late-night train.
Halfway to Portland and a couple boarded the train and sat right across from me. The man was talking radically with hands and mouth about something important. I wasn't listening.
I had become distracted by the words themselves, which, as each was formed, became solid and real and seemed to float for just a few seconds right outside his lips. As he continued to speak, more words came to life and floated there, and as I watched(mouth watering and stomach reeling), they seemed to sprout tiny little mushroom-shaped parachutes which floated down around his legs to land about his feet. He seemed to find himself extremely important, and so continued to give birth to more and more words until there were so many piled about his feet that I thought he'd soon be buried.
The image entertained me, provoked a quiet laugh as I thought about how perfect the whole thing was; he, burying himself alive in his own magnificent ego. I knew that he would continue to breathe even as the words piled up over his head; and, in fact, would most likely thrive from them, eating them alive as easily as he had given birth to them, never knowing his hypocracy.
Acid boiled at the back of my throat as images of eating children coiled about my imagination. I suddenly loathed that man, and I didn't even know him. I despised him, wanted to crush him, yearned to see his perfect mouth filled with splinters, and for what? There was something huge in me, but I could not say.
My stop was announced as every other stop had been announced by that flat voice, roughly identifiable as Woman. She made my destination sound like sandpaper rubbing against sandpaper. I couldn't wait to escape the train's familiar, unnatural yellow lights. They illuminate ugly.
My right foot took that first step off the train as if ages had past since being there before. Each toe searched in vain for something new in the cracks of the sidewalk, but not even the ants had moved. That first step echoed throughout the canyons of my ears, and then was gone.
It seemed, then, as if I had left something behind me; as if a weight had slid off at the door and had remained there, staring like an unloved puppy out the window at my departing figure. Something inside me smoothed out and the sickness began to fade. The hammering in my head became a soft thrum as I walked the quiet walk home. I was alone, but I did not feel alone in the dark that night. It was cold, but I did not feel cold in the dark that night. Some quiet angel seemed to be whispering into my ear that everything was going to be okay.

Blue night turned to blue morning, a shift I hardly cared to notice. Ants cluttered the walls in thin, proper lines, business-like and strangely military compared to the jig-saw thought fragments bumping into each other in my head. They collided, rebounded, collided, but not a one would fit together.
With sterile motions I made my coffee and sat in the window of my apartment, looking down on the homeless and the drug addicts that made their circles below me.
I woke up to find myself on auto-pilot. I was no longer in my apartment. I had gotten lost in the caverns of my mind and I hadn't been paying attention to where my feet were taking me. I had no real destination, I just needed to walk around the city in order fulfill a strange desire that had kicked from deep within my chest. Movement seems to help the restless mind.
I lost myself in the crowd on the streets. I became anonymous, another shade in the variety of the social rainbow, lovely and organic. We grew together as a mass, molded into shapes that molded into shapes, some pieces breaking off, others joining at the elbow, the knee, at the eyebrows of the thing.
The faces around me became blurred, undefined and inhuman, and yet I was increasingly aware of my own clarity. I became sharp, cutting through the mass without effort, untouched. In that moment I was selfishly seperate. I was conscious of every limb, of every fiber that made me Woman. It was as if I had been cut out and raised; the pop-up in a pop-up book. In that moment no one could touch me. I was real. I was no longer a part of reality.

If my mind were a house the white fence in front would have the word "BILE" spray-painted on it in orange. The inside would smell like Cheerio's. Every mirror would be broken and the glass would jingle like change. This is what I told my therapist, Dr. M. Morrow, when he asked me to create a metaphor for my broken mind. I refer to my mind as being broken because I wouldn't be seeing a therapist if I didn't need some fixing. When I gave him the metaphor he nodded and said, "Um.", and proceded to scribble down some notes on his excessively large notepad.
I hate his notepad. It seems so secretive and mocking to me, as if it is lauging at me, winking at me, deleriously excited that I am unable to read what is being written about me, the broken mind. The color of the paper is a sickening yellow that reminds me of infected fingernails. Somehow, I suppose, that color is strangely appropriate for displaying notes about infected people.
What about me is broken? I ask myself this question because nothing about me seems wrong to myself. It is only when I am around others that I feel different and inadequate. It is only around those who wish to change me that I feel I must change. I am an outsider to everyone else but myself.
Last night I had a dream about a man I do not know, and even now I could not tell you that he ever had a face. Mostly I remember that he was taller than me, and that he wearing blue. As we walked side by side I turned my head at an angle to look up at him. I was smiling. We didn't know each other, and yet we were happy walking there together, sharing each other's company. I remember seeing the shape of my hand, how the thumb stood out and how the sun illuminated it from behind, when his hand touched mine. I remember thinking, fearfully, "I don't even know this guy!", as our hands sealed in a palm of light and our skin warmed. We never spoke a word, and then I woke up.