Hat tip to Schrodinger

Right now–not sure if I exist…or not.  Real or not?

Can anyone even see me?  Hear me?  I think I have spoken, I think I have been heard, but then…nothing.  Silence, absence, vacuum.   If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me.  There’s a face in the mirror but it doesn’t look real.  Inexplicable–of course it is real, but no, it’s not, or the person behind it isn’t real, I don’t know.

You’re not making any sense.

There are so many names but none of them are mine.  None of them fit.  The voices too.  And there’s no air in my lungs.  I keep breathing but it doesn’t help.

Do I exist?

You can’t ask that question because you can’t define your terms.  Define “I.”  All you know is what you are not, or what you think you are not.  Creating negative space around something doesn’t create matter in the positive space.  Now define “exist.”  You don’t know that either.

What I know is something is wrong and I need it to stop but I don’t know how to make it stop.  How can you stop something if you don’t even know if it’s real?

nihil

Last night I kept dreaming of being in institutions–boarding schools and psych units.  For once, the psych unit dreams weren’t bad.  It was being somewhere that people noticed I existed every day, not just once a week or when they needed something done.

In my real life, I go days without talking to anyone.  I rarely leave my bedroom, let alone my apartment.  If I disappeared, who would even notice?  It would take weeks for anyone to realize I wasn’t here anymore.  Probably not until rent or bills came due and didn’t get paid.  Then add a few days before they’d decide it wasn’t just that I was depressed and ignoring my phone.

It’s like I’m barely here.  Right now, I’m not even sure I really do exist.

So I sleep, and I dream, and in my dreams, I am real, I exist, there is a space for me where I am held.  And then I wake up and there is nothing, I am nothing.