You would think I am sad and lost if I said that the mountains were a part of me even though I have never lived inside them and you would think I was gone if I said that the shadows that fell over the moon that clung to the mountains was a part of the skin that lined the inside of my bronchi.
At night I can feel my bronchi constricting as they try to save the moonlight caught in my chest my lungs feel like they are melting out but I lie as still I can on my bed because I want to become beautiful on the inside.
Bad idea not good idea to use that word the word beautiful descartes would scoff at me right now premise premises!! I can hear him shouting his french accent lilting and blanketing the hard rage in his voice and his mind.
Not true not absolute everything you are and everything you have and everything you see is not actually absolutely there and everything that crosses your mind is polluted and not pure therefore your mind is dirty with non-intuition and you are not a proper human being so fuck you for thinking that any part of you could ever be beautiful.
Early onset persistent conduct disorder made my best friend set my bed on fire when I was seven years old and he grabbed a knife and tried to stab me when I cried and told him to stop and stop and stop and he made himself stop himself and he made me give him my kittykat and I watched as he slit open kittykats throat and then he smiled and made me drink the warm salty kittykat blood.
Kittykat blood dislodged my mind when I was seven and then Descartes crept in through the cracked spaces in my skull and made me realize that my brain was headed in the wrong direction and had been headed in the wrong direction ever since I tried to think about anything in anyway at all.
This winter I shovelled the snow in a frenzy my body turned into a sweating throbbing puddle underneath my woollen coat and still I continued to throw piles of snow around the sidewalk and the next day I woke up feeling like I had been gripping an angel in my sleep but that’s just untrue and stupid because angels are only for clean people and I was probably just struggling with a jinn.
The coldness seeped out f the day yesterday even though it’s only the middle of january and I took off my coat and felt the sun flood over the leftover stale moonlight in my throat but today I woke up to an angry wind that burned my cheeks and made my fingers curls into question marks and the wind always makes me want to sleep for some reasons it makes me want to lie down on the grey sidewalk and just close my eyes and go away.
You can’t make up your own rules all the time said in a sloppy white suburban Michigan accent tinged with tones of upper middle classness and firm and smooth skin of watching experience and never experiencing experience pacing and nodding up and down in front of me and then my veins feel so jumpy i could stand up and paralyze you with the lightening sizzling in my blood right now.
I think it’s freaky that so many psych majors are so fucked up i don’t think people with issues should be helping anyone yes because every fucked up person should just be locked away and spit at and only the emotionally stable zombies should be able to preach to the moonless sky right? right? right? Damn you kayla and your goddamn emotional stability
Sometimes I feel like the rapid intake of moonlight might have ruined my voice because sometimes when I talk I am surprised at the rough scabs that have developed on the inside of my throat and over my tongue sometimes it takes a few minutes to get one word out and then it skips and twirls and takes forever to shape itself properly so that other people look at me like there is something wrong with me and I want to explain about my scarred and roughened throat but I don’t have the energy left to form the words anymore.
Earlier I said my friend lit my bed on fire I was lying and I was lying when I cried and told mama the same thing and she took him away from the house and I felt really bad because I had been the one that had wanted to play with the fragrant matches on my bed and it was me that had given him the knife and made him stop kittykat from crying and then I had felt really really bad and really really dirty and I felt the tears pour out and coat my face and I saw his face coated with tears too but something made me say those untrue things to my mom and then after I said them I cried again and that night while I slept in mama’s bed I made myself forget about myself to make myself feel better.
There is still some bits of broke moonlight caught in my throat but they only make me feel worse about myself because they can’t cleanse me on the inside like I thought they would and now I am tired of not being able to use my voice or my memory or my mind and descartes is probably laughing at me from his porch on the moon.
Madiha Khan is a university student in Windsor, Canada, a city full of rain and old car factories. She spends the majority of her time bike riding, reading, writing stories that confuse her friends, and looking at triangles
–Art by Natalia Drepina