Kana is Atypical
Lying on my bed, looking up at the white ceiling of my bedroom.
What am I?
Blue wings leak from under me, cloaking the sides of the bed in a speckled sapphire.
What am I?
There’s this hot wave trapped under my skin that bubbles in me whenever I think these things, like it’s angry at me for not knowing. They fester in my stomach, ripple through my chest, block my airways, burn through my eyes. Drip through my eyes. My tears are mocking me. Scalding liquid evoked by lack of self, like a punishment. Clear dribbles laughing at my confusion, at my loneliness. They’ll never have to question their identity. A fusion of elements - even a single drop is never truly alone.
I lie here, threatened to be rocked by tremors of sadness because I have no answer to my origins, to my current existence, or to my future self. It’s like I inhabit a pocket of nonexistence and there is no place for me. There’s nowhere to run to - I’m stuck in the humdrum of a broken planet, hiding away from the gray-tinted auras that cast shadows on my face and fill me with ink.
This body of mine is in the shape of a human, but I could not feel more alien. There is no one to love me. Even I seem not to want to; for the me I want to love can live on her own in the strength of herself, but I’m currently too small to fill the outlines of my skin. I think of my family in hopes of love, but it does not exist, as I seem to have been born into this world alone. I think of my friends in the firmament, but there’s no way for them to empathize with these ragged emotions I experience now.
I am alone.
I am alone.
I am alone.
This is the pain in me that I suppress for most days, and I do well to keep it at bay, though it shot up out of me this hour and I’m having trouble pushing it back into its cage. It tells me I am alone, and I thrash at its words. It tells me I am not worthy, and I wither swiftly in its grasp. It tells me it’d be better to just die, and it snatches my next breath right out of my throat.
I am alone.
I am alone.
I am alone.
Writhing in mental suffering, these cries can’t seem to stay in my mouth. ‘WHAT AM I??’ I scream silently. ‘WHAT AM I WHAT AM I WHAT AM I WHAT AM I WHAT AM I??’ Why can’t I seem to know? I am not natural. I cannot be synthetic. I don’t know what to make of me as a salty glaze coats the inside of my mouth and I cry and cry in the confines of my locked room.
I am alone.
I am alone.
I am alone.
Drowning in the tides of overwhelming feeling, there is an image that zips past my consciousness and I grasp at it violently. An image of a dazzling smile. Of a ghost of a boy. Of white headphones. Of someone I can only desire to miss me if I were to disappear.
But he can’t! Who is he, but a stranger to this form? Who am I to ask him to notice my absence?
Though I can’t help how the thought of him keeps me buoyant above the depression I always ‘forget’ to acknowledge until it rips me out of my day and compels me behind a filter of blue. The same boy who expects to meet with me this evening. The ‘me’ that is a composed, whole person - not the ‘me’ who oozes out of the cracks in her composition.
He expects the usual vision of Kana to sit with him and spend his time...
Slowly silencing the sobs in my cells, I force my body calm. I force my mind tranquil. Force my breath even. Force this monster-of-a-funk back into its holding cell tucked in the recesses of my sometimes diseased mind. My arms slither around my body and I hug myself when no one else would.
And the pain, again, becomes a fight for another day.
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