System Override

Yesterday it did not stop raining, and I did not stop thinking: the sky’s my sadness surrogate doing my crying for me since I can’t. It is only a light drizzle at times, reserved and barely audible, like the quiet weeping of a man who doesn’t want the neighbors to know. Other times there is a torrential downpour, a deluge like racking sobs, the whole fucking sky opening up in front of everybody and spattering loudly against every surface without a lick of shame at all.

All of it happening as I sit at the window, a movie I just saw called Obsession still on my mind, watching this relentless precipitation while my own eyes stay drier than the Sahara and something huge and devastated is leaning heavily on the door behind them… waiting for the door to go.

then leaning turns to pounding. something feral throwing itself against it. emotions with no name. pure animal instinct, desperate and hurt enough that my body has become a prison and its existence in it one instruction: get out get out get out! shoulder first, then both hands, then its whole weight leaning into it again, slipping when it lands, scrambling back up before it has properly got its feet under it because maybe this time, maybe if it hits the same place harder, maybe it will feel it start to give before something inside it tears first. its palms are full of splinters now from trying to find an edge where there simply isn’t one. fingernails split down into the cuticle, slick with its own blood, and it just keeps trying to claw its way out anyway. it would bite through the goddamn door if it had teeth left, if they had not all been knocked out from the repeated blows or left cracked and broken from gnawing at the steel trap clamped around its leg. it would chew through its own limbs if there were anywhere left to run… but there just isn’t. there is nowhere to go and no dignity left to find shelter in. no language, even. just wet frantic breath and choking and that awful inhuman guttural noise things make when they have suffered badly enough to stop understanding that nobody is coming, nobody is willing to open that door, and until it breaks down its only option is keep trying to break through. so it does, keeps trying.

The door doesn’t go. Doesn’t even fucking budge.

I am a fortress.

The door does not buckle, fracture, creak, or groan. It is only the pathetic creature trapped behind it that comes apart.

Hell of a thing when the weather has better emotional range than I do. And the most fucked up part, perhaps, is that I want that ugly mess, to let it through: total collapse, the helplessness, the shaking and leaking, just letting it run down my face and drip from my jaw. But I am not able to pry it from the cold undead landlord in my chest who stands there, every weakness and vulnerability bound by a leash gripped tightly in his hand, going ‘tsk tsk, not on the furniture, pal.’

So it stays in. Every soft raw little thing I ever was or will be locked in the basement while I watch the rain through the glass wishing a pipe would bust in the walls and flood the whole place, carpet and all.

I keep asking, over and over: what does it cost me, composure? The only obvious answer that comes back is that if I have to ask I can’t afford it. I wonder sometimes how deep in debt I am at this point. I wonder what fine day a guy will show up in a cheap suit to tell me I’m officially bankrupt. It is only how I will take the news that seems apparent enough not to wonder about; I’m sure I’ll stand there bottled up with a poker face and leave the uncorking to the fucking clouds.