Below The Surface
Below the surface it is a hoarder’s den of things I do not say, and things I try to keep myself from feeling. I take those things, the things that are too ugly to sit on the display shelf, and hide them away.
As a child I would lay in the bath, hold my breath and let myself slip below the surface of the water. “BLOOP” and the world was gone. It was just me and my “below-world.” I learned as a teenager that I could achieve the same effect with the real world. I just conjured up a mental image of the bath water and “BLOOP”, I folded space around me and I was gone. Invisible in my little pocket universe. People would just walk right by me as if I was no longer there.
This space used to be calm and uncluttered, but when my mother died I started taking things there. Fear, Anger, Heartache, Screams. I began to clutter my hidden world with things I did not want others to see or be bothered with. I would pull all the unwanted and painful stuff out of everyone’s sight into my world below the surface. I would go there to be in my gallery of pain out of the sight of most people. No longer a place of solace and peace. It became my private screaming hall that no one else could access.
With my father’s death, there is no more room. The space is overflowing and random things wink back into existence in the real world. Escapee’s from my personal menagerie existing between breaths. Every new scream or attempt to pull something in results in something being pushed out. I have stretched my ability to hold my pocket space together to its frayed ends. It takes so much energy to keep things there. My private pain gallery has started to phase into my “real” world. Wherever these poison things land they leave scorched earth, and I am helpless to stem the tide.
