The Ill Soul
A poem
She said these pills could stop the torturing questions
and uninvited made-up scenes inside my head.
So, I counted the pills I drunk every night and every sunrise,
then I compared to the number of times I made an excuse
in the middle of the class to cry alone in the bathroom stall.
These pills were the placebo,
the false god,
the wrong belief,
and the old myth
people still believed.
The dead-end road
people still turned to.
I bit my nails,
I bit my finger,
I pinched my skin
— I never did more
because it could mark me
and stain the dress
I carefully sewed
with my sane mind.
Hiding my dark and bark was the thing I aced every day,
In the class where I was judged based on how well my memories could do and how far my logic could go, not how well my emotions could flow.
In a café where I read books as if I liked to explore the chaotic turns of life, and not to plagiarize other people’s ways of survival through life,
At the street where I walked with my head up and gave my warming smile to familiar faces, only to deceive them of my sanity,
At my neighbors' front doors where my hands were full of gifts so, at least I could paint other people’s days in lively colors whilst I could only paint my sky dark grey,
In the living room where my parents watched the TV, blinded to where I run to every night — their nightmares,
At the dinner table where everyone exchanged small talk as if normalcy was their tone of life, unknowingly having a daughter chained to her wildest mind,
In the kitchen where my mother hummed in joyful rhythm as if she never got to know a definition of a rumbling kingdom — these bleeding bruises,
At the club among the beautiful fake masks on the dancing weary souls,
On the bench while waiting for a lover who never witnessed my late-night screams because he never really held me,
Those smiles never lasted long,
You could even suspect the fraud in my loudest laughter,
My colors outside weren’t waterproof to my tears
that rained under my blanket.
I turned on joyous songs.
I let them echo aloud
and played them on repeat
as my meltdowns soundtracks.
I was sinking into the sea
of my melancholia
at their gleeful bridges.
It was only a curable anxiety, a timely depression, a simple disease with an undeniably effective treatment, I lied.
It was an endless turmoil of joy and gloom,
a juggle between looking up and looking down,
a speeding racing car through rainbows and rains.
It suffocated but never killed.
It never took my breaths away,
it only weighed them down.
Muthia Huda 2023
