It's all inside my head
Day or night dream? Fantasy or reality? An inner child's recollection of the ending of a therapeutic relationship
Match. Here I go again. Back in the gutter. Trouble as always. Bedraggled and sitting on the outside of the world. No one, nothing, belonging no where. Not my world but theirs, never the less one I crave still. Their house belongs to the inside of my childhood before I knew about all these horrible outside things that no child should ever know. I hold onto the distant memory when I too lived inside behind those open curtains where there was light, comfort, warmth – joy even. I never knew then just how cold and brutal the outside world could be.
Here I am. All alone on the outside, looking in at a life that does not belong to me. A body that is not my own, disconnected from my head. Walking dead. Numbed. This resting place must be where I belong because no matter how hard I try I am always pushed back out here into the cold and dark. Pushed out into the streets, sitting on the curb of a gutter again. Same feelings just a different gutter and cast of people, all players in my story. My place? My home now there is nothing left to fight for. How can I go with this flow? The flow is gushing beneath my feet on its way to the depths of the drain. A drain I would do anything to disappear down. It’s flow washes over my disconnected feet. The cold water running over my exposed toes is full of dirt, people’s street droppings, animal excrement yet soothing in its odd familiarity.
The gutter - my home now. It’s where I belong again.I remember when I first summoned up courage to knock the door, to go inside when the door was opened for me and I was invited inside. It took several attempts to knock rather than turn on my heals and run away but in the end I willed myself to do it. My need was so great, my longing to belong heavy in my heart. I stood outside looking into the warm cosy room, bedraggled, cold, dirty as usual . She let me in before she realized just how dirty and untouchable I was. Was it pity or did she really care and want to help me? Now I am in that place that I know so well, a place I have come to accept as one of real belonging for me – the gutter.
I have survived this last kicking out. One more brutal expulsion that belies all previous rejections. Sitting here with my head low down on my knees, weeping silently so as not to be heard, wondering how I have survived this last expulsion. I am cold as stone, tears are turning to ice on my cheek. I cannot look back even though the heavy pelting of my fragile body has stopped. I trusted her when there was no trust in me for anyone. Rejected on a press of a button. Tossed back into a place of brutal solitude I am accustomed to but cannot accept.
I had tentatively knocked the door as I had done many times before when seeking out my little sanctuary, an anchor of reality every Thursday night in my manic week. A warm quiet room in someone else’s house that as usual was not my own. The last time I was here something must have gone wrong between us. I can’t remember what that might have been because my mind has since shut down. I look up when the door opens from my usual stance of staring down at the floor. She’s not there to open it for me. I panic as a male figure picks up something from the shadows behind the open door. Without warning from this gentle warmth of the place that had become my sanctuary, something dark and heavy rains down on my head. I catch a flash of silver in the moonlight. It's his heavy garden spade. The spade I had often seen on previous visits, resting against the garage door ready to be put back after a day’s toiling in the garden he kept so well.
Down it comes, blow after blow on the top of my fragile head. My severed head falls off and rolls onto it’s resting place on the black tarmac of his drive. My head and body separated. It’s over. But no. A another head falls and and hits the ground with an almighty thud and rolls across the drive into position. And another, and another until all 37 are scatted in position across the drive. Headless people seeping out of my ravaged body. Tendrils of the blackened, bloodied wisps that can only be my murdered soul fleeing from the prison that held them all together inside the bodily fluids that make up the physical part of me. They are free. Gone, expelled by force out of my ravaged body. From some small part of me – that little invisible speck I call my purple soul I think.
I can see my severed heads all littering up their drive way. She would not like that. She does not like mess. She likes clean, order, simplicity not the dirty complex mess that I have grown to accept as part of my life. I know that because when I showed her photos to help her understand the kind of life I lived, Swivelling away from me, she put her head in her lap and wept. Panic swept through my body and alerted my safety system. I almost got up and ran to the station near her home in case the train was coming with my daddy. He would comfort me, take me back home even if I told him about the reality of my life. Instead I froze in that figure of 'Flop' who knew from many years of practice how to play dead.
The heads roll a little into their final resting place. Like billiard balls ready to be potted. An empty headless body left without sight but still feeling and sensing every little move he made as he scoops them up onto his spade. This gentle man, lovingly protecting his wife from knowing anything more about me. One by one he tosses the severed heads into the gutter outside his drive just as effortlessly as when I had once watched him toss weeds onto his compost heap. The messy shell of my body that is all that there is left of me, slithers into the nothingness puddle of a wet blooded mess on his doorstep. He scrapes it up from the threshold and tosses into the gutter with all my battered heads. As he closed the door he calls after me.
‘You’re gone now, all of you. You won’t come bothering her again. She told me that you wanted to get all those silly people who live inside of your mixed up silly little head, out of you. Well, they are out now and will never return, neither will you. She's free of you and so am I. We won't ever need to be bothered by you again’
The door slammed, the light darkened slowly. Gone - all of me.