Prison - an expose

The worst prison one can ever have is one's mind. I wish I knew how
to escape mine. Sometimes I can fly 10 000 miles over the moon and talk
with Orwell, sometimes I'm 70 and surrounded by grandchildren and
sometimes I'm so scared of my reflection that I hide under a blanket of
tears.

Have you ever felt like you were being torn apart inside? All day,
every day, pulling yourself in half and half again, examining the
shreds and stamping on the recognisable features. Intent on
destruction.

People fascinate me, I confess. I wish I could see their thoughts. It
amazes me. How you can be in a room covered in people, suffocated with
friends and family and feel as stranded and alone as if frozen in ice
10 000 years ago. I wish I knew how people worked. How they
interact.

My mind is concrete to me.

Life is brittle, fragile. So easily stolen. I try to reach out and
touch it to revive myself - maybe taste that energy, that spark. Taking
experiences. But...nothing. Always this consuming vacuum inside my
chest, devouring my heart. Clich?d, perhaps, but I cannot find the
words. I never could. Oh, I can read, I can talk, don't get me wrong.
But when I try to speak it's like...it's like my mind and my mouth are
broken. Wired wrong. Disconnected. I want to talk, I want to get help,
I want to fill my emptiness, but when I try to explain all I have are
tears and frustration and blood soaked bandages.

I wish I could understand. How can I say things I can't
understand?

I try to make myself feel something. Try to be alive, to have the spark
invested in my surroundings. It doesn't help. I know I'm alive - I can
see myself in the pools of my mirrored eyes. But when I look deeper,
the window to myself, a void pulls me in so violently that I cannot
stand. I can prove I'm a person. I feel pain and fever just like you.
But that's all. Passion. An anger and lust so violent, so intense that
it engulfs my skin and my life. Dangerous enough to tear apart...are
they friends? People whom I love, if I am capable of such strength.
Every night I try to become a little more human.

Sometimes it works. Music can help. I couldn't live without sound -
something, anything, to connect me to emotion. Alcohol as well. I have
to watch my drink. I wonder if I'm an alcoholic, when I need vodka to
let me talk to people. But then my body doesn't matter, except for sex.
Anything I do, any exercise, is only to stay attractive. For what have
I to offer but breasts and hair and legs, clad in skin-tight denim and
a cleavage-enhancing bra. If I lost that, my link with the world, my
saving grace in a sea of loneliness, I think I would die.

I do try to talk. I try to explain to a - for want of a better word -
friend that for all my independence, I am scared. Terrified that the
world will freeze me forever, and in 10 000 years I will wake up and
find I never lived.

So instead I collect experiences. Anything, everything. Drugs, sex,
music, travel. Pain. And sometimes I find a fleeting connection with
the man beside me, but grasping it is like a five year old doing
Quantum Mechanics.

And that's why it happened. Because of experience. I didn't mean - I
didn't want it to go this far. But he left me, he was here in my eyes
and he left me. I don't, I can't remember. We were just talking. I
don't understand.

All I wanted was to be a person.