Misfits #4: handle with care
Prescription: care. Take it when baring your soul. You swallow the sugar-coated tablets readily enough with a glass of lukewarm water, each placed fresh every morning on your grateful tongue, when you are fighting fierce to protect your inner core from the harmful effects of mere existence. Thus, you must increase the dosage all the more when skin, bone and scar tissue fall apart, disintegrate and separate, and suddenly your soul can smell the poisons, the putrefaction, the pollution.
Take two capsules of care, three times a day before meals, or as directed by a medical professional.
I don’t know why. Is there s a shared sign, a stabbing sensation in the back of the throat that leaves you for gasping, too breathless to comprehend? A realisation. I see into too many people. I should mind my own. I too readily believe that I can glimpse the soul’s tell-tale entrails leaking through open pores. Seeing what I shouldn’t see. Don’t want to see. Not for my sake, but for theirs. Yet I thank the shadowy spirits and the ghosts of my own creation that we are not all the same. There is strength through our diversity as well as our similarity, echoes and non-echoes.
I want to know, just as much as I don’t wish to know a single word. I have heard too many uncertain voices on these hissing airwaves, electrical blizzards, snowstorms of static, and by now sense should have made me selfish. I’m sure that if we started, we could share until we were blue of face, hoarse of voice and tired of eye. Against my better judgement I encourage you to unfurl the rope ladder, climb down to the bottom of the well and hide, beckoning me in beside you. Cramped in eternal space, we crumple then we crease. We whisper deep into the dark and through the day that has suddenly made night out of a round wooden roof, staring into our private patch of empty as we make the brick-lined blackness our co-conspirator and confidant.
Should we, instead, lie in open fields, stare at limitless skies and believe that a sun that doesn’t make us ache for four walls, reassuring claustrophobia and our own private breaths truly can exist? Do you know the way?