Making Rainbows Out Of Something Painful

Hello again.

It’s been a while. What do you want from me. What will you take from me, this time. I know something I didn’t know before. You aren’t me. You are only happening to me. I will twiddle my thumbs and you will pass. This is what I’ve learnt. You are happening to me. But you aren’t me.

I am more than you.

*

I looked down at my cactus, once green and plump, now purple and shrivelled. Was this some sort of winter hibernation mechanism, I wondered. It looked more like it was dying. All the life sucked out of it. It looked like I felt, purple and dry and far from life.

I mustered the energy to hit the plant shop, wondering if they’d refund me, I didn’t do much wrong, I told myself. Holding the cactus up to show the girl at the counter, she looked at me aghast, like I was some sort of plant molester. What did you do to it? I stared back blankly. Your cactus is dying, she said flatly. I walked back from the shop under the cloud of my own mood, thinking how on top of my life being a total dead-end no-show, I was a murderer.

For close to two months I’ve felt like this. Unlike my cactus, I don’t quite have the energy to die. I just feel inanimate, unplugged from the wall. But I must be coming out of it, I haven’t been able to write for weeks, and…