Looking For Escape

The afternoon sun is still bright. I’m surprised, because the clock reads 7:30pm and I expect the moon to be out and the stars to wink and say it’s close to bedtime, but the daylight is still so bright, and, despite my mood, there still appears to be enough time to work on more projects before slumber calls me to its den.
I lay on my soft bed, paralyzed, as though I’ve awakened in another realm from a coma, only my surroundings are unpleasant, like a hospital that smells of sterilizer and death. I’ve opened my eyes from a restful nap, only to remember the cause for my unrest, the cause for my initial weariness an hour before. I lay in bed, motionless, the same frown that I wore an hour earlier still remains, the feeling that something is not quite right. The overwhelming feeling that the world around me is wrong.
I lay in bed, wondering if a shower might do the trick. Maybe I’ll snap out of it then… but the mood, the relentless malaise that is real enough to smash, and yet vaporizes as I try to find a reason for its form. It did not change when I got something tasty to eat the other day. When I felt sad and alone and just a little grimy, when I thought that surely some oral pleasure would snap me into happiness, I ate the Thai food, I ate the pupusas….what I wanted was not delivered, the noodles, the sweet soda, they looked like what I remembered, crispy and stuffed with cheese, cold and sweet. But, it just wasn’t as good as I remembered and the wait was extra long and the restaurant smelled a little weird and the traffic was bad. And after all that I wanted from that snack, placing my hope for happiness upon it, it did not come with the order. I left feeling defeated. I lay on my bed remembering
And the piece of chocolate? Try that. Maybe…I get the cookie, I take a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but I grab a spoon with the same limp arms and I put a bite on my tongue with the same sad expression tugging at the corners of my mouth. My eyes are red and the sweetness does not bring me a smile.
And the nap? I escaped the feeling momentarily, but I awoke to my neighbors screaming and they sound like chickens dying and why do they keep scraping their chairs on the ground? I escaped it for a moment with closed eyes, but it’s all here, still here.
Maybe a shower? Can’t I just rinse all this stuff off of me? Can’t I send this weirdness down the drain along with other sediment my body rejects? And I lay here, my mind strategizing for a quick fix, a lay, a bite, a laugh. But I know. It cannot be bought away, eaten away, slept away. It follows me, it’s inside me. It colors my eyes, turning my brown irises into cloudy lenses that distort the world into obstacles and enemies and everything that comes towards me is an assault to my existence. I cannot escape what’s inside, turning me into a woman lost in a house of distorted mirrors.
I know the change has to come from within, but I’m having a hard time reaching inside. I’m the shell of what I remember. The silt at the bottom of a pool that cannot be cleaned. I don’t like it, it feels awful, and only I can change it. Laying here, I wonder if I’ve actually tried. I’ve tried the old standards, the ones that never worked before, but have I tried anything new? I’ve sat in the hole all day, wondering how I’ve got here and refusing the lifelines sent to me and ignoring the ladder by my side. I need to try something new.