Sadness is kind of funny. The whole concept of it is paradoxical and I find myself reverting back to writing that exact same first sentence every few months, after every short dive into the deep end of the pool. Sometimes I fling that sentence onto the page while still labouring for breath in the water. Maybe I cannot even run my fingers through the differences anymore, because the water seeping through my grasp is so cold, has numbed me so much that I cannot ascertain where my skin begins and the water ends.
Maybe it’s not sadness that is funny. Maybe it’s people. We have all these branches of academia trying to pinpoint the flaws in humanity, spread them across a map, colour them into a graph, we carve out our own DNA with scalpels and smear them across mirrors to just see something fucking reflected in ourselves and I’m tired of looking at the same face every morning and seeing everything but answers. I’ve opened books instead of bottles for years, and for years those pages weighed my chin down and I began only to imagine what the stars shone like because I could only see them reflected in spilled milk. Let me redefine this spilled milk sadness for the several hundredth occasion and reface myself in the mirror, I need anything but another prescription, I need more than just hard ice. I need to unarm whatever is causing earthquakes inside of me, these tremors and trembles create tempests and the words that float in the ocean of my mind become disturbed. They are in a constant state of disarray, abject dismay, a perturbed form of dejected ennui.
The worst part is reaching for the volume, turning on anything to keep yourself submerged and we all do it. Why does Beethoven play in my dreams? Why is it that Debussy echoes down the empty streets at night? I feel Vivaldi’s winter overture in my heartbeat, those vibrating strings create pulses so enigmatic that I’d like to take those notes and place them next to the seismometer inside of myself, match them together like it truly means something, align the rumbling activity to the melancholic music stuck inside these bones, there is a symphony taking place within my ribcage that shakes the tips of my fingers as if I am orchestrating it. Am I orchestrating it?
I am the creator of my own machinations, I have sewn together this Frankenstein from bits and pieces of my past and breathed life into the monster, I have unleashed this affliction that poisons my thought, that decays my mind. I am slave to my own creation, burdened by the weight of this crime, my eyes are too heavy to keep open– yet every time each lid closes, splattered Rorschach’s blot my mind and I am plunged into a darkness so intangible, so inexplicable, so unwavering that the wings of ten thousand ravens in flight rip across my chest and I am torn open, spilling the ink onto whatever surface the words will reach.
Is this what it means to write? Are these the chains? Is sadness but a symptom of the debilitating disorder coursing through my veins? Is this why each key I tap to spell each word I think reminds me of what it must have felt like for Beethoven crafting his next piece? Are we all but just shaking at the fingers, trying to hold onto whatever just slips through our grasp as we drown in our own oceans?
-AS
Someone I care about deeply wrote this, and I am utterly floored. I wish I had the talent to write as eloquently as she does. I want the world to read it. I want it to be published somewhere for others to admire or disregard it. It has such a depth that goes beyond the ocean floors. It made my eyes well and spill. It’s raw and I’m in complete awe.
