Asylums (Cisco)

Have you ever seriously considered taking your own life? Then you know.

You know that that desire is never about loneliness, that it is never rooted in the wanting to be alone. Being truly alone, and the silences implicit in the word would be so much more comforting than that which finally would drive you to swallow pills and never have to wake up, or to truly slice through your own skin with the sharpest blade you have, to cut through tendons, arteries, and veins and to feel the warm fluids of your body drain, slowly. You know that the thing that would drive you to dive deep into the ocean and breathe in and swallow, filling your lungs and your stomach with briny water, to surrender and finally be weightless, is to realize, finally, that you could never be liberated from the constant murmuring in your ears, or in your head. When you finally realize that you can never be truly alone, especially when you know that you should be alone. That is what finally breaks people into taking their lives…the knowledge that the voices will always remain.

I know what you’re thinking. But no, I’m not at that point. Yet. Or again. But I understand. People who are afraid of being alone have never been truly alone; they have never allowed themselves to fight against the constant barrage of susurrations, of invisible, mechanical crickets, of the pleas and whispers in their ears from who knows who or what…could they be ancestors? Future selves? Desires? Fears? Or are they just the clicking of the brain, its need to access its own grooves…I have fought for true silence. I have even managed to win. And it was joyous.

I floated in darkness.

I swallowed the moon.

Then I found all the beauty I was meant to find in my life.