Sanctuary of None

I am a miserable human. I am a slovenly waif, without purpose or direction. I do not have kind words, and, thus, I do not speak. When I enter a room, people take notice immediately. I see the looks on their faces. They try not to look at me. They avert their gazes like one does when one sees a homeless person. They suddenly find a speck of lint on their sleeves the most interesting thing they've seen in the past millisecond. They grow uncomfortable under my stare. My look strips them raw, pulls the skin from the sinews of their very beings. My stare penetrates the dainty shells protecting their central processing units, their brains, and not one of them likes it. They never do. They don't even pretend to be polite and leave as quickly as they can, afraid I might be bringing something more sinister than mental paint thinner.

I'm not homeless, though. I live well enough, but I don't have cares about myself, and I don't have cares about how I'm perceived by others.

I am unhappy but quite satisfied with my discontent. Joy could tear me apart. Happiness could rend me limb from limb with the vulnerability it would enter into the imaginary numbers and the equations making up who I am.

I occupy very little space, but my presence engulfs any space occupied by other humans. What I realized, though, is this: Most humans are miserable. They don't inhabit the state of being miserable. Somehow, they pick themselves up each day and have hope for something better. They try again.

I have given up hope. I don't want to try.

I clean myself during the monthly visits from the social worker and only to keep from being institutionalized. Sometimes the social worker is a man, and sometimes they send a woman. They speak in high tones and very loudly, as if the louder they speak the more likely I will understand and respond. I nodded once. The glimmer or excitement in the social worker's eyes caused her to become excited, to feel like she had made progress with me. I immediately went back to the vacant stare that unnerved anyone around me, the stare that wordlessly, of course, seemed to convey no one had any secrets from me.

I read a book about a lady who walked into the sea. She filled her pockets with rocks, enough rocks that she would be weighed down the farther she walked and the deeper the water became. She was tired of the people, and she was tired of life, and, in my opinion, she was tired of herself. Here's something I learned about death by drowning: as the oxygen supply is cut off to the brain, there is a flood of endorphins released, and as death is imminent, there is a sense of euphoria. This is the high that is chased, sometimes with extremely unfortunate results, by people who engage in auto-erotic asphyxiation.

I cannot be bothered with death or making plans for death. I suppose I'm a malingerer.

I quit speaking when I was a child, perhaps in kindergarten. Cowboy Bob on the television instructed children during his noon program not say anything if they didn't have something nice to say. I was angry all the time, even as a child. My internal malaise became a living, breathing thing, which eventually took over my entire person. I realized I didn't have anything nice to say and retreated into myself. I had nothing to say, and speaking words for the sake of speaking seemed superfluous and self-serving, and the only words that could come out of my mouth wouldn't be nice.

I became a waif when I was young in an effort to occupy as little space as possible. I eat to subsist and have taken it upon myself to be no more than a fly on the wall. Although, my very presence, quite small, indeed, fills a room immediately, and can clear the room quickly.

I don't go out often. My groceries are delivered. I don't do laundry. I wear my clothes day in and day out until they begin to decay and fray, and then I throw them away and change into something else. My newish clothes come from a bin in front of a church. They are castoffs, unwanted, and sometimes unwashed, by their previous owners. They are meant for me and people like me.

I once saw a show on television with a man who cleared a room. He was an emotional vampire, feeding off all the emotions and feelings of everyone around him, leaving behind husks of humans. People see me. I see them. I see inside them, and I see the husk unfurling. What they don't know is that I have nothing to do with their burgeoning detritus. They slap bright stickers on the husks, spatter paint and splatter glitter and go on with their lives, under the assumption the husk is gone. But it never leaves. A husk is a husk, and eventually it dries, cracks, and disintegrates. Their husks, though, leave little bits of what they tried to use to disguise the mess of their lives. I face it daily and know it for what it is.

Eventually, I imagine I will find myself inside a bell jar with a finite supply of fuel, and there I will be expected to stretch the fuel to infinity. I will never be able to consume everything. I won't allow myself. And I ponder this. If there's no hope, if I'm tired, if I have no words, then why conserve? What am I missing? Is there something I must see? And I decide, when I'm taken to my asylum, I will consume everything. There's no hope. There's no reason. There's nothing that merits good or kind words. I would still have nothing to say, based on the very tenets laid down by Cowboy Bob. And there's the disgust, fear, uncomprehending looks of the world because I have failed to embrace that which has failed me to no end.