It's a Sort of Sickness

It's a sort of sickness no one can see. Invisible to the naked eye. Take your bloods, check your temperature, shine a torch down your throat, and still there’d be no antidote. No cure like the common cold. Mothers don’t throw parties so their own catch it before they grow too old.

It’s a sort of sickness that can’t be healed by hotter than hot water bottles or a few too many doses of Calpol swigged on the sly, the ones when your parents haven’t a watchful eye.

Inconspicuous,

disguised.

Hides behind

lies.

It's a sort of sickness that makes you yearn. Yearn for time. Small, embryo-like. Too young for

stabilisers on bikes.You yearn to recoil, to shrivel and shrink. An antithesis of metamorphosis, with your sanity on the brink.

You plead for it. For that time. For a time. For the time when you weren’t tall enough to reach that top shelf or watch that film by yourself. For the time when your neck hurt from talking too long with too distant relatives and your bum ached from too long a booster seat ride in the back.

Gold-plated memories.

Fallacious.

Rusting underneath.

Those

tender ages

teetered

with nothing but

tender feelings just

beneath.

It's a sort of sickness that has its symptoms paragraphed, not bullet-pointed. Published, not in pamphlets, but books. Durable tomes. Much greater and much more deep rooted, with those roots you envision much more rotten and rooted.

A Devilish Delusion.

Really,

you realise,

you yearn for a time that

never existed.

So, life, as it is, grown and matured, feels opaque. And in the centre of that opaqueness, and the fuzziness, and the dullness, you feel saturated and manured. Whether it’s with distrust or dark recollection, life as it is never feels as quite a perfection. Not quite as right as others’.

You feel

other.

A tsunami-ed sea versus a lucid lake. No breeze. A constant, humid day you lay in, aware and awake. Smaller and weaker, and shrivelled and meeker, whilst others stroll in an early September-like weather

with a mind

and a life

and a future

that’s just that little less

bleaker.

Curfew, however, has passed by the time you realise. The fever fuzz and the continuous buzz. They sit marinating for years in a maze of mental mess, where depression and anxiety disguise themselves as the enter and exit. You’re trapped. And the only way out, you feel, is to climb. Where others follow a path laid for them, you clamber thorned walls, endowed in nettles with no doc leaves in sight.

And then, when you reach the summit, you’re not met with that long forsaken utopia. You’re only met with a birds-eye view of that marinated maze of mental mess you didn’t even yourself create. Your life, your memories, your feelings start to deflate. Whether it be fate or something innate, all you’re left with is a clearer view of the strenuous road that’s been left out in front of you.

~

This is my first rusty but raw piece dedicated to childhood trauma.

Currently: learning to love lagging behind a little in life; some of us are a wee bit rough around the edges here and there after prioritising survival over development as children - and that's okay. We learn to love ourselves as we become ourselves :)