Asylum of My Mind: A Beckoning to Darker Places

November 30, 2009

Asylum of My Mind: A Beckoning to Darker Places

A subtle flickering of light in my head, a missed revelation to coming events. For a moment I think to myself that it’s nothing at all, just something for today. It won’t last. Everything will be normal again.

The faulty wiring in my brain, the lapses in ability to remain here in the moment, leave me feeling withdrawn. Farther and farther I free fall into the abyss of my own thoughts. Or perhaps I’m walking, walking by my own choice and by my own free will through the door and into the darkness. Always searching, always seeking answers to the questions that no one gives a shit about. Only me, only I care to know.

The silence of this place is louder than the voices in my head. The glass from the closing door slips over my eyes and the world is cut away from me. The sounds of the outside world are muffled and every message is delayed. I look out into the faces of the people I once knew. So far away and yet so close.

This barrier was built by my own hands, whether by intention or not, to shut out the things that antagonize the thing that torments me the most… myself.

Continuously, I wander here. Echoes of past events ramble throughout the hallowed halls of my mind and I lose myself in memories and a thousand things that never were.

There are no windows in this place. As I wander further from the glass door, the sunlight is swallowed by the darkness. It’s cold here, a type of coldness that doesn’t just settle on your skin. No, this cold creeps into you until it nearly stops your heart.

At first the endless black is somehow inviting. A sense of quiet peace comes over you. It makes you think that everything will be okay, that in this place nothing can haunt you and nothing can hurt you.

As I travel on into the depths of my mind, I find that the eerie silence is just the threshold of so much more. All the places that scare you, they are nothing compared to the darkness of the human mind.

First, it’s the voices of the living and the dead. The screams of agony, of the torture that I cannot save them from. The lies and the secrets, the false hope and the dying love that rips apart the souls of human beings. The shame and the guilt of bleeding hearts and the irony of our inevitable defeat.

The faces, the faces tell a million stories. They beg and they plea to be heard, to be given a chance at redemption. Chained by the wrongs that they have committed, the freedom they seek cannot be given, it must be earned.

I walk along, deeper into the darkness, never knowing where I’m going and somehow never caring. I ask questions that I don’t understand, expecting answers that I eventually never accept.

The voices and the faces are not all that exist in the darkness. There are flashes of memories and dreams, visions of things that have been and things yet to come. This place makes you dizzy, it makes you remember and it makes you forget. It makes you want to live and it makes you want to die. It teaches you how to love and it teaches you how to hate, it shows you what’s worth living without and what’s worth dying for.

Here there is no today and there is no tomorrow. Every day is now and everything that was, still is and everything that could be, will be. This place is madness and it is genius, it is absolute freedom and absolute tyranny, it is order and it is chaos.

There are twins here. Two beings who are one in the same, living apart from one another. Both rule this place and everything here is manifested by their will. One I have come to call the demon, but both of them are me.

In the center of this vast plane of cognitive incognition, there is a small bead of illumination within the blackness. More powerful than all the quasars of the universe and smaller than an atom. It’s purpose here, I have not yet come to understand, but it summons me here. This small flickering light so seemingly obscure. I sit and contemplate all the things that I know and all the things that I do not know. Ever so vigilantly, staring into the tiny void for answers and reasons.

There is a loneliness here in this place. A sense that I am alone in my thoughts. At times, I beg to be made numb, wish to be seduced by the material things of this world. To be wrapped up in worthless things so that I may forget all that envelopes me. I plea to forget the knowledge, yearn to be free of the burden, cry out to lose my empathy. Make me heartless so that I don’t suffer anymore, drug me so that I no longer concern myself with the human condition.

Sometimes it is hard to travel to this place and other times it is hard to leave it. I weigh the pros and cons of staying and leaving. The world outside is so alive and beautiful, but the people in it seem so lifeless, so lost and corrupted. Always working for something tangible, but never satisfied when they get it. I wonder to myself who is really better off, them or me?

I find myself in the belief that the sun, the skies and other stars, the wind and all the non-human things this planet offers are worth coming back here for. They endow upon me a feeling that I cannot replace with anything else. It’s humanity that I find to be questionable.