in a past life

{all artwork by a}

Spokane - Proud Graduates

I am lying awake in a new bed in a new city, blue light, heavy air, and still I can’t sleep. I resurrect past lives and memories to fill the emptying television screen always on in my mind. A great tide of nausea washes over me periodically, as someone shouts outside, close.
I have gotten one hour’s sleep in the last week. My bones are weak, and I hate to eat, but I need to. Still, everything tastes the same.

Erik Levander - Sekund

The nest of spiders in the dark corner of my ceiling is spinning, they are busy busy. They cast freakish shadows over the room, reaching down to me, and back, legs extending. I am hallucinating again.
Once, when I was ten, I brushed a stray hair from my face, and found a wiry garden spider clutching the skin of my hand -
I stretch for the clock: five hours and twenty minutes until work.
Let me repeat, I am alone, again, in a bed, trusted not to hurt myself. Trusted by my parents and my doctor, and despite their love, I am down again in this hole where no-one can look up, crying, half dead, and sated with all I wanted from life. That is, all my life can give. I keep going further and further down this tunnel, even as it shrinks, to wonderland, and I cannot stop.
In the moonlight, the cuts on my arms look like spider’s legs.



The Luyas - Cats In A Bag

There are two types of people, those who have felt this intolerable numbness, and those who cannot and never will. If this is familiar, then I’m sorry for bothering the wound, but if not, all I can do is hope that words do not fail me, and ask that you try to understand before you reject any attempts to justify my distaste for living.
It drags on - not intentionally, you hope desperately for relief, you long for it to come from somewhere, and ending it yourself becomes acceptable, becomes understandable. It seems more like a kind of hibernation than death. Just sleep.
But still, no one wants to kill themselves, it’s just the easiest way of not feeling pain. When I cut myself, I am just trying to stop my descent. It is an unwilling acceptance of the fact of suicide. The pain, the sharpness, the swell of blood, it’s all just a distraction. Insomnia, that is another step, because your pain cannot sleep. It is a constant evolution towards death, a process controlled by whatever it is that you are hosting.
I weigh eight stone. I don’t know how much of that is my depression. I would guess it is as heavy as a feather, a mere fraction. It weighs little, but commands so much.
The nest of spiders expands and contracts like a set of lungs. Breathe in, breathe out. Like the tides, or a hurricane in a net of hair and web.
All I want is to get back to sleep.



Efterklang - Cutting Ice To Snow

Two more hours of faking unconsciousness and I jerk out of bed and wash my face. I don’t feel it at all. I’m drinking weak coffee before I know it, and sit blankly at my kitchen table, my hands gripping the dull mug handle. Coffee stains remind me of sleep.
Dawn rises white and yellow outside, thin colours.
I feel like I’ve been sleeping in my work suit, light blue shirt, navy tie and pants. Out the door and facing into the cold, something I can feel, and I pull the collar up on my coat, the only article of clothing I own that I actually like. My breath forms in the air in front of me as I walk, my head down. Empty city, heads on pillows made of down, people eating cornflakes wherever they are around me. I might be alone. I sit at the bus stop, half an hour early. My hands are dug firmly into my pockets.
I see no-one until my bus pulls up.



Belle & Sebastian - Sleep The Clock Around

It's half-empty. I sit alone near the front. My thoughts are elsewhere, I don’t even know where. There are kids at the back, unnaturally hushed. The driver turns the radio off, as the news ends. It is a sick grey evening, and there are crows flying in the sky above us.
The bus stops and people get off.
People get on.
We keep driving for another ten minutes, when some people get on whom I suddenly feel I should recognise, but cannot place. Two old men and an old lady first, looking lost and scared, followed by a middle-aged woman who finds them seats, and finally a slight girl my own age, wearing a red t-shirt with a patch where the heart is, with the same distress signals in her eyes.
I realize we have stopped outside the mental hospital.
The girl sits beside me, avoiding my gaze. The old folk are quietly staring out the window. They have no thoughts at all.
Her hair is unwashed, and she is untidy and unkempt, but I suddenly feel an impulse to tell her I love her.
“I love your t-shirt.”
Shit, that didn’t work out. She looks at me, surprised, like I’m the one from the home, and is looking away again, when I see her eyes fall on my exposed forearm, beneath my open shirt cuffs, and she breathes in.
Just then the driver turns the radio on again, and music plays softly.
“What happened to your arm?”
She looks at me properly. Her eyes are huge.
She tells me story of how she went to the home. How she opened herself, cut herself to ribbons for her parents. She’s telling me this story because it’s all she has.
“But I kept leaving, so they had me committed.”
I'm thinking. I tell her about my story, my attempt. What went wrong is my parents came back earlier than they should have, and found the car with the engine running. Their train was cancelled because of a suicide.
She smiles, then she laughs.
The minder from the home is watching us.
Somehow the sun has found its way out, and random metal objects outside are shining.
“We’re going to see the beach.”
What happens then is I don’t get off the bus until she does, and as I do, the minder asks me not to talk to the patients. Then this girl, she comes up to me before I leave, and tells me her name, and that she is a mental patient being treated for chronic depression, with visiting hours two till six everyday except Thursday, and she runs off into the tide.

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The beautiful Tsvetaeva, Plath, Arenas and Woolf {1, 2, 3, 4} illustrations are all by Anika. There are more. You should also all listen to Erik Levander's fine album, Kondens, more of which soon. Thanks for reading.