Nothing can be more gratifying than swimming. And the sensation of the sun 's warmth on my cheeks.
What running does to your lungs is a prize that is to be earned.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Sunday, May 3, 2015
An Anonymous Post to Berlin-ArtParasites
"It feels like there was a time when, with my friends, everything could
be reduced to a spectrum of simple, yes and no questions.
Wanna hang out, you going to the bonfire, dinner together at 7?
But humans aren't simple, and I learned that the hard way, when my room's walls started shaking and closing in on me at night. When I started counting the calories in my toothpaste because, at the end of the day, they do add up. I learned it the hard way when my anxiety kicked in at 5 in the morning, when my shaking breast woke me with waves of pain that felt like earthquakes on my limbs. When the idea of showing up a few minutes late to class, and having people's eyes on me as I made my way to the last row of seats made me consider not showing up at all. When my friends' questions could no longer be answered with a simple yes or no. Are you ok? BBQ at Josh's tonight? Are you sure you're ok?
I curled myself up in so many balls by now there must be a cylindrical imprint of my body on the mattress. I learned that crying takes up a lot of energy, so I started hibernating through my days. Grey blurs of hours, followed by long cold nights, and all the sobs reverberating through the walls.
Walls closing in on you. Bricks closing in on you, mocking you with their weight, collapsing onto you, stealing all the air from your lungs. Sobs.
Cringing at the smell of food, and all the vomiting.
The fear of people, and people everywhere around you.
People talking on their phones, arrogantly talking on their phones. People who look like they know what they're doing because they speak loudly on their phones.
Dark hallways that morph in front of your eyes to look like mazes, the hollowness at their end whispering your name like a chant, like a prophecy.
Trembling hands, the telephone slipping through your fingers as you try to dial your mother's number.
The signs of it on your body that go unnoticed. The dark circles that weigh your eyes down, the scratches on your notches. The pounds coming off your body, the hollowness of your cheeks.
Blankly staring at the front of the classroom as your professor struggles to start a power point presentation for today's lecture. His background picture is that of a galaxy, and you wonder how it was taken. How do we photograph entire galaxies, you wonder. Is that a computer made picture, a picture made with a computer, for the mere purpose of fitting on a computer screen?
And the bruises. You wonder how we get them without noticing. How we wake up bruised, having no clue how we got hurt. How do we go through all those quiet injuries? How do we let bad things happen to us, pain happen to us? How do we know when to draw a line, a black line that means: I've had enough, here starts "too much"? A black, straight line, when the geography of our lives is a list of grey, in-between bits. Constellations of bruises we have no idea how we got. Yes or no questions you can no longer answer. Sicknesses and diseases that carry the names of people we met who most likely forgot about us.
I remember my philosophy professor telling us that names carried power. You give something a name, you give it an existence. My disease has no name at all, or too many. Regardless of that, it carries more power than anything else that's happened in my life. Someone else, someone with a nice piece of paper on their office's wall, could be able to name it for me. But, just like I'm glad I never got to choose my own name, I'm glad I get to choose not to give a name to all of this."
Wanna hang out, you going to the bonfire, dinner together at 7?
But humans aren't simple, and I learned that the hard way, when my room's walls started shaking and closing in on me at night. When I started counting the calories in my toothpaste because, at the end of the day, they do add up. I learned it the hard way when my anxiety kicked in at 5 in the morning, when my shaking breast woke me with waves of pain that felt like earthquakes on my limbs. When the idea of showing up a few minutes late to class, and having people's eyes on me as I made my way to the last row of seats made me consider not showing up at all. When my friends' questions could no longer be answered with a simple yes or no. Are you ok? BBQ at Josh's tonight? Are you sure you're ok?
I curled myself up in so many balls by now there must be a cylindrical imprint of my body on the mattress. I learned that crying takes up a lot of energy, so I started hibernating through my days. Grey blurs of hours, followed by long cold nights, and all the sobs reverberating through the walls.
Walls closing in on you. Bricks closing in on you, mocking you with their weight, collapsing onto you, stealing all the air from your lungs. Sobs.
Cringing at the smell of food, and all the vomiting.
The fear of people, and people everywhere around you.
People talking on their phones, arrogantly talking on their phones. People who look like they know what they're doing because they speak loudly on their phones.
Dark hallways that morph in front of your eyes to look like mazes, the hollowness at their end whispering your name like a chant, like a prophecy.
Trembling hands, the telephone slipping through your fingers as you try to dial your mother's number.
The signs of it on your body that go unnoticed. The dark circles that weigh your eyes down, the scratches on your notches. The pounds coming off your body, the hollowness of your cheeks.
Blankly staring at the front of the classroom as your professor struggles to start a power point presentation for today's lecture. His background picture is that of a galaxy, and you wonder how it was taken. How do we photograph entire galaxies, you wonder. Is that a computer made picture, a picture made with a computer, for the mere purpose of fitting on a computer screen?
And the bruises. You wonder how we get them without noticing. How we wake up bruised, having no clue how we got hurt. How do we go through all those quiet injuries? How do we let bad things happen to us, pain happen to us? How do we know when to draw a line, a black line that means: I've had enough, here starts "too much"? A black, straight line, when the geography of our lives is a list of grey, in-between bits. Constellations of bruises we have no idea how we got. Yes or no questions you can no longer answer. Sicknesses and diseases that carry the names of people we met who most likely forgot about us.
I remember my philosophy professor telling us that names carried power. You give something a name, you give it an existence. My disease has no name at all, or too many. Regardless of that, it carries more power than anything else that's happened in my life. Someone else, someone with a nice piece of paper on their office's wall, could be able to name it for me. But, just like I'm glad I never got to choose my own name, I'm glad I get to choose not to give a name to all of this."
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