Have you ever been stalked by a day? Not a particular moment, really, but one singular day...the same every year. You feel it approach, and after a while, it slowly begins to feel like a predator. That day is a little over a week away for me. Sometimes I feel as if it will eat me up, chew me up and spit me out...and I will never be seen again. Sometimes I fear that it will drive me mad. That it will shatter my entire sense of reality, like it did nearly seven years ago when I was not Rachel...when I was some shape-shifting blob of skin and bone, but no mind or soul to occupy it. I wonder where I went all those years ago, when I wasn't Me.
I looked up at the clouds last night, and I was so struck with fear and pain that I swore my heart would beat out of my chest. The poem "Alone" by Edgar Allen Poe came to my mind at that moment.
"From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by -
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view."
Thanks, Edgar, for saying what I am unable to. I went inside and sat at this desk (my sanctuary) and in one minute typed out a short poem.
Every year it's different. Every year my emotion changes. One year I'm depressed, the next I'm suicidal, the next I'm crazy and I don't remember what I did. But every year I do the same thing I did the day after Jane died; I sit in my room with a bottle, a pen, paper and two packs of cigarettes. This year is different though. I still don't know how I'm going to react when I wake up on June 10th (that is, if I sleep), but I have some new, very close friends this year that I didn't have last year. Will that change things? Will that change me? I don't know.
The clouds look like bruises;
Dark streaks of purple and pink
Ominous, vindictive and vengeful
Promising of more pains and further storms
In those clouds I see her face
And I long for home...
Is it better to be mad and know it, or to be sane and have ones doubts?