I heard the shackles hit the floor, and the key felt warm in my hand.
I had forgetten how heavy the weights were, and how much relief I was capable of feeling.
I felt weightless, only for a minute.
I looked around with adoration.
I felt anticipation for the potential in the weightlessness I was about to be given.
It felt boundless, limitless, positive. I sucked in my surroundings like it was my heroin, reaching to feel the intoxication and the rush of injecting life back into my veins. It would last. I don't know how long, but I was hoping it would be long enough to be transported away. I embraced back the squeeze from the air, and became reacquainted with the giddy unknown of today. This felt good. I had been elusive to how good this felt. I looked out. Everything was whizzing past me now. Not so much a blur, but a static. A comforting static. Everything was in clarity, but as I sank into a trance, it lost focus. I let it. Greens and blues and whites danced around alongside me and I could hear their anthems. Slow, beautiful, fortunate. They were lucky. They had access to all this time. I felt my first pang of heaviness. If often arrived shortly after. It started small. I knew It would not grow until later. But I could feel it manifesting, sitting, waiting. I sang it away with my instruments of new found liberation, and was at ease once again. Before I knew it, I found myself amongst the unfamiliar. It was then that I realized how profuse my appreciation was for being amongst strangers. It was then I realized how long it had been since I felt home. A concrete kind. This newness held the most security. Avenues I had not taken held the utmost excitement as cracks under my feet, unexpected turns, and new art clad my journey and periferials. These came as gifts. Everything was spinning and the record kept playing. I could hear everything. Every color, face, step. It sounded lovely. It felt remarkably different from anything else. I could still feel the marks from where the shackles had once been and pulled my sleeve down. No time for that now. I looked amongst eyes of different shapes, hairs of different colors, strides of different speeds. Each of these came with a stream of stories that attached them to the sounds and colors of this place. I pictured it like a cloak, flowing behind each person like a compilation of every moment leading up to their being here. I began creating them myself; extravagant ones, humble ones. For people I had not known, but in this moment felt close to. I was envious at those whose stories kept them here for long, feeling what I feel now but permanently. I tried to imagine what this upbeat, yet hushed life could do to a persons longevity. It seemed nice. I'm sure it didn't work out like that all the time, but it was not the first time I utilized naivety in exchange for peace of mind. I knew not what time it was. I liked not having to countdown.
Something. What was that thing? I could hear something in the back of my fantasizing and contemplating frame of mind. It sounded obnoxious. Loud. I couldn't really tell what spawned it, but it sounded menacing. And just like that, I knew it. The thing I was worried about, subduing, pushing away. I could feel it slithering around. It began to consume every beautiful thought I had incurred while exploring this weightlessness. I cried out for it to stop, begged for mercy, fought it even. I continued to move. Things whizzed past me again, and sounds were muted. I hadn't a chance to digest the wonder happening around me anymore in the midst of my internal battle. I looked down. I was in quicksand. I fought I fought I fought. I had nothing to hold me up. I desperately tried to summon what high I had left, what I had seen, what I had felt. But this unknown force was stripping these things from me, replacing it with heavier things, rapidly bringing me down.
Then it all stopped.
I could feel it on my face. It began to swirl around me and everything. stopped.
It was dark now but a single light was on. The music was more melancholy but I found a way out and I needed to take it. It was faint, the music. I closed my eyes. One face remained among the many I had seen earlier. I looked into it and saw no fabricated stream of stories and memories I had made up, but real ones. Lovely ones. Some, I shared. I could see me in some of them. I felt a wave of rejuvenation after it all. I had forgotten that the real world in which I dwelled was not bad at all. Weights I had placed upon myself came from my tendency to overcompensate for the hurt of others, and what I can not control. The rain created a curtain and the world around us was now shut out. Part of that made me sad, yet the other part brought me grace. I looked out to the water, the faintest of nightlights in the hills. I resisted the urge to just sit there, and let myself be cleansed, and let myself be fixed. But I was reminded just then of the worlds inability to completely nurse. I had been looking to this day and this high and this weightlessness to be the salvation I needed. The problem in doing this,I came to find, was I had surrendered my ability to fix myself before I even started. I saw now how vulnerable this made me, and how susceptible I was now to crumbling under an array of things gone haywire. I looked to the sky and let the darkness shut my eyelids and I felt every drop hit, and journey down the cascades of my face. I knew it would have to end. But in this end, I wanted to find a start. The monster in my head came dressed as anxiety, guilt, frustration, paranoia. It came dressed as so many things, it fed on my inability to divide and conquer. By the end of my high, I was heavy and tired and this was unforgiving to the face which I had shared a cloak with, and myself. I was surging in and out of being shackled and being free and I could feel the toll it was taking, and the unwanted transformation I was hastily making. It was time to let go of what I could not change, begin to trust in myself more, and to create my own static. The one I had not so long ago, but had given up in the midst of fighting my battles. I would not go back to the tortures of weight I foolishly placed on myself. I had missed the old me, and I was going to get her back.
I could feel the light again. The key felt cold in my hand. I chucked it out into the vast waters, and heard the shackles hit the floor. I looked to the face which had loved me before I placed weights upon myself, and remembered the girl he saw.
The restraints would never come back.
A new kind of high started.
I would no longer hold myself down.
.K SG C.
