Automatic Writing

It’s the morning, my body shivering with shock at being forced out of sleep. Trembling in the cold white light, clinging to the dressing gown draped around my bones.
I’ve had to get up early, as if I had a job, to get the train into town and sit with K. while M. finishes her tattoo. I don’t know if M. is expecting me to be there, I don’t know what our relationship is now, our friendship a little ragged around the edges with time and distance. I’m back in town but no happier than ever, stapled down in suburbia with the weight of security and stability, forced to stare into my soul. So far I am avoiding eye contact.

I can feel tears building in my chest. I don’t want to be a weight around everyone’s necks, bringing up my unhappiness at every opportunity, beaming it out through my face. I would rather not go today, but all the advice says to push through, go through the motions. I’ve absorbed a lot of advice over time, questionnaires asking whether I enjoy doing things less than I used to. The past tense isn’t relevant here, not usually - there isn’t a bright, cheerful previous instance of myself for me to claw my way back to. The only way is forward, into the void. 

I’ve been dancing around the edges of something lately, my childhood I think, perhaps my present. Something squats on my brain, something big that I can’t think round. A memory, maybe, or a realization. I’ve put up walls around it. It’s blotting out the sky. As I try to approach it, investigating tentatively, my heart starts to race. My mind doesn’t want to go near it, it doesn’t want to be poked, it digs in deeper, claws sinking into its wrinkled throne. I have the feeling it’s masquerading as something banal, it’s something obvious that I just don’t want to see. It’s hiding behind a completely opaque black block, like it’s been censored for TV, and it’s big.