What fresh hell is this today? A broken boiler and no money. But more importantly no brain that can distinguish between chores and trauma. Making a phone call to get the boiler looked at? That feels like trauma from a lifelong misunderstanding in communications. The terror felt at the thought of a phone call, the tight chest waiting on the line, tightening further still when you try to explain the situation to a stranger on the phone without falling apart. You can’t take information in when you’re in distress, each spoken word feels like needles in your brain stabbing away at the last word that was shoved in there. Now it’s just a bleeding pool of noise like word-static fizzing and oozing around your head and you’re dizzy and angry and you want to slam the phone down and stab your ears out just to make it stop and ensure you’ll never have to listen to words again. Fear penetrates your brain so easily, like a sound penetrates an eardrum. Your head is like a mad roundabout with no exit, vehicles beeping and emitting toxic fumes everywhere, crashes and fatalities and road rage but all the drivers are you, smashing yourself to pieces, killing neural pathways, creating dead ends. Where are the breaks? Is there even a seatbelt? Existence puts you in the driver's seat but you don’t know these roads, these navigation rules, the safety lessons. It would be like snatching a fly out of the sky and ripping off its wings and telling it to cross the spaghetti junction at rush hour and not to be so dramatic about it. You try to take a breath. What were you saying?
The frustration wrapped up in needing to communicate yourself to others, the frequent deafness to your plight, mocking your dramatisation of such a simple chore. But it is not a simple chore to you. You have reached the edge of despair and you're leaning over it with horror on your face at just how much more incapable you could actually become if you lose your last remaining semblance of self over such a ‘minor chore’. How embarrassing it will be if this phone call to a plumber is what gets you sent to a psych ward. A phone call. Hilarious really, you’ve cried so many times over the course of your cringe-worthy life about how much phone calls distress you. Everybody laughs at you for it. Age 10 - laughter. Age 16 - laughter. Age 20 - gasping disbelief, followed by laughter. Age 28 - eyes rolled, tuts emitted from gritted teeth. Age 30 - backs turned. Age 35 - arms thrown in the air, newspapers slammed down. Age 37 - you’re alone in your living room with what feels like a dislocated jaw, chewed up inner mouth cheeks, the frown lines on your forehead so deep you run your finger over them wondering if you’ve previously sliced a knife over them to create such large tracks? You’re getting old. Too old to be this pathetic. Your deficits are excruciating for people to watch, it’s a wound on your own existence - other people's expressions. A mirror of self-reflected horror. Like the story of your life being authored by other peoples faces, like a performance art in small acts of body language and movements, a tiny sigh that speaks volumes, an exhale of what little breath your worth. You can’t prove them wrong. You can’t improve. You get worse with every phone call. You get worse with every chore. Each mounting up into such a pressurised vacuum that makes your heart feel like it’s going to crush and pop, but LOL - a tiny pop, not even a big one, because the black hole that is your body will swallow the burst up before it even completes its explosion. A mere ‘brrrp’. Gone. So undramatic and yet you feel it soooo dramatically - there you go again! Making a big deal of minor occurrences! Acting like the death of your heart is gonna be some big explosion that will show the world just how badly damaged your nervous system is - HA! Hilarious! It was a mere ‘brrp’. The audience's sigh was bigger than that. You’re pathetic. As always. An embarrassing death to mirror the embarrassing life you led.
The phone slips from your hand. Breaking into pieces on the floor, sounds reverberating in your head, fragmented like shards of broken glass piercing you with sharp flashes of light entering your brain like an epileptic being hit by lightning, again, again! A white heat spreading down your spine, forking off along each rib and reaching around your torso like electric tentacles in search of an energy source. But your rib cage is empty, the simmering remains of your blackened heart barely giving off a sizzle. The electric brain-tentacles curl round the remnants of your ash-like smouldering heart-meat and… hug it. Yes, a hug. You are not alone, it whispers, I’ve come to join you in passing.