A Soliloquy

The feelings jumped about in a boiling mess, like Spaghetti strands in a pot and she knew she had to try—she had to try because she wanted to keep her sanity and this ugly confusion currently turning her heart into a muddy body-strewn battlefield wasn't helping.

She knew she needed to reach into that broiling confusion and try to isolate each squirming emotion to follow it to its end.  Then, she'd have to try again with the next one.  And the next one, and the next one, until she'd wrested control back from the petulant child in her chest.  The only problem was, as she stood staring in front of the bathroom mirror, she felt neither brave enough nor strong enough.  Or was it something else? 

As she looked into those brown-flecked irises she'd known from childhood, focusing first on one and then the other, she hesitated to guess at an answer, but she just knew that, cutting the bullshit, at its core, she was afraid.  Afraid of what she'd find at the end of any one of those emotional threads, afraid of the consequences.  But she had to try, she had to try because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

Now to be sure, she could understand the reasons she felt this way, and in fact had witnessed the very same thing in others, at times with pity but more times with a guilty mirth, like watching an old lady wearing high heels falls down off the curb.  Oh yes, she knew why she felt like this, she just didn't understand the intensity, the shoddy roughness with which her own body threw her about, the cacophony of biochemistry that her very brain mixed up and threw over her like boiling oil.

The combination of what she fervently hoped for tinged with the nagging thought that it was forbidden, corrupt or somehow unclean; these would one moment have her flying through the clouds and breaking through to the brilliant sunshine above only to have some inconsequential occurrence send her into what World War I pilots called a Graveyard Spiral.

Sometimes, when she wasn't studying the situation too closely, she enjoyed it in a perverse manner; it meant, after all, that she was alive.  "No dead thing could feel like this," she'd tell herself, a simple act that would once again bring on the soaring, the wind blowing past her ear as she once again made her way up, up through the clouds while in her mind's periphery, only too painfully aware that around the corner, in as little as a few seconds, that sinking feeling would brutally bring her reverie to a painful halt.

The good times were exquisitely good: her heart would fill and expand, doing an impressive imitation of the lungs taking a deep breath.  Nothing could go wrong now! But oh, the bad times--the crash, the pain, the intense longing.  Oh how those  were just as exquisite and just as inversely deflating as well.

"Well," she thought, steeling herself, might as well start with ...