Her mind is such a place to be.
Biologically speaking, it is a brain. Soft muscle tissue that winds and connects and intertwines in a complex mess of knots. Forty percent grey matter, sixty percent white. And it has around one-hundred billion neurons, arguably the most important part.
But cut it open with a theoretical knife, and what do you see?
There’s a whirlwind, too much clutter swirling around the place. It’s messy, unorganized, and if you’re not careful while looking around, one of the pieces might come flying out and scratch you. Every piece within is capable of drawing blood – she is too submerged in the extremes of every thought in her head for any of the pieces to be smooth or blunted.
Perhaps the meds were able to dull some of the points, but most of the sharpness remains.
It can be jarring, disturbing, or simply absurd, her mind. Wading through it is an arduous task, to say the very least.
But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find it gets worse.
Sift through the tissue, kneel down in front of any one of the shards. While you do this, close your eyes and allow your other senses to take over.
The pungent smell of panic and desperation pervading the murky atmosphere.
The echoes of confusion, the screams of anger and despair, the constant pleas begging to be heard, begging for the ability to make sense of it all.
The taste of pain, thick and tangy. Like rusted iron, sickly to ingest – but there is too much, and you can feel yourself slowly choking on it. You’re drowning, and it’s like you can’t come up for air, and you wonder: how does she live with this swirl of chaos in her mind?
She won’t tell you the answer, because frankly, she couldn’t.
She doesn’t really know.
But she has a guess.
Place your palm on the floor, right up against the mushy physical vessel of her brain. Keep those eyes closed, and really concentrate.
Bum-bump.
Bum-bump.
Bum-bump.
Bum-bump.
Bum-bump.
Bum-bump.
BUM-BUMP BUM-BUMP BUM-BUMP BUM-BUMP BUM-BUMP –
Her heart.
It beats strong and steady, that stupid heart of hers, but then again it’s not stupid at all because it keeps her alive, doesn’t it? Pumps the blood through her veins, biologically, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
The wretched thing does not give up.
It combats the chaos, combats the pain, tries to smooth out every single shard in her head.
Where there is sadness, it supplies hope.
Where there is anger, it floods her with compassion.
Where there is confusion, it provides her with much-needed clarity.
Sometimes, understandably, her heart makes things worse. It can add fuel to the fire, wind to the whirlwind that makes her stomach churn and her head spin. It has no sense of calm or reason, but it does hold light and happiness. It does give her strength and will. She wants you to see that she would not be here without it, as chaotic as it is, because it is the only thing that can seep into every crevice of her screwed-up mind and use its unbridled glory to reign in her sanity.
It is beautiful, and it is messy, and it is her, and she knows it may not make any sense to you or to anyone, but it is the complexity that is her.
And she’s glad that it’s kept that precious excitement for life flowing steady through her veins.