I don't think that
the fragmentation occurred all that slowly. I might have told myself
that, at some point, or several interlinked cross-sections in time,
overlapping each other like different dimensions;
all telling the
same tale. I might have told myself a lot of things, if I'd taken the
time to pull apart the threads of the lies
that were holding me
together. It's just so unfortunate that I actually did just that,
deliberately and slowly; carefully lifting the veil of the years,
even the ones that had come
long before me. I know now that there are
things we carry all so unseemingly, like they've been stitched onto
our skin; I carry the sight of my mother's eyes on all the Sunday
mornings, the pink bathrobe and her raven gaze, all those angry
wrinkles,
trying to convert the sadness. I know now that this will
never pass, and one day she'll be long dead and I'll just be here,
still talking to this memory.
In one way or
another, the fragmentation happened over night, though it might have
taken forever to set in. Parts of my soul are like concrete dreams;
everything eventually cracks. And from the cracks there grow
nightmares, always nightmares. Because that's all I am; he used to
call me monster and then he would stroke my head and hair.
And I guess I had it
coming. I used to stand there, in the middle of the storm and the
ocean and the drought; and in all the melodrama I kept feeling the
approach of something larger. And I guess I told myself that I could.
I could. I definitely could. I absolutely could. Whatever would
happen next, I could count on myself.
Maybe that's what
the fragmentation thought too. That I could count on myself, but not
to brace it or win it or defeat it. I could count on myself; let the
nightmares seep through the pores, find the cracks and fill the
desolation. Somehow keep on fueling the chaos machine; keep on
dreaming, keep on escaping, keep on vanishing. Nobody could have
known that I would catch up, and then I would fragment. They say you
break, they say that the stitches snap, that the wounds tear, that
the soul melts. Nowhere on this damn packaging does it say that you
will simply dissolve. But you do. You absolutely, definitely,
amazingly and wonderfully do. Fragment.