bold bright feathers

There are certain people that translate their moments with you into a dense conversational economy. They see every interaction as a window into piquing your interest, and hence put everything on the table as soon as you walk in the door. So as you know it’s on the other side, as you put your key in and turn the lock to click, your mind kind of takes a large breath in because it knows of its needs beyond your control or comprehension.

The odd thing about mental illness is the way in which it is socially spread, seemingly. Ill thoughts heard from others are contagious in that the more one is exposed to them, the more they remain in the back of memory, a repeated reverberation. For instance: one who works with acute mental illness hears about suicide (grandiose thoughts of self-harm) often in a typical week from those around him. He then has a few thoughts go through his head that imagine suicide, where none were present before. This comes to consciousness, bringing the thought, “Did I just think of that only because I was exposed to the possibility more often lately? Who’s to say that having these thoughts [as the reflection on these thoughts brings a multiplying effect to such thoughts] is abnormal, and why is that thin line between thought and action such a huge leap from distraction to diagnosis?” Minute cracks of distressful thoughts get their foot in the door, and only the strong and educated avoid dysfunction, danger, deviance. The drugged and marginalized still live within a frame, but cracked and weathered.

Two jars sat next to each other on the counter. A man had things to save in them, and he tried to, but the jars had no lids, so everything spoiled. A woman next door had two lids, with much to save as well, but could not fit much into a jar that wasn’t there, let alone a mechanism for tightening thread. Just like water meets earth and sun meets skin, symbolic symbiosis is as substantive as anything tangible; we live in the metaphor. Hence, a man and a woman lay next to each other, stifled, wanting, waiting, but get captured by sleep and tortured inconvenience before any release can occur. A man and a woman touch skin, hand to shoulder, lip to lip, cheek to back, but still succeed in their curiosity, if for no other reason than failure and cessation bringing the two closer to each other. To know someone’s thoughts is to know their timidity and their trappings, as well.