3:17 am monologue
surreality in the witching hour. thoughts connected and disconnected.
i wrap my blankets around myself like they are extra layers of flesh. i twist my warm, pulsing, body in them. the darkness glows. i observe that the room smells vaguely of mold. maybe the room is rotting. maybe it is me that is rotting— yes, i think that’s it— i’m rotting; i’m rotting from the core out.
[to be blunt, i am very aware of how painfully often the concept of “rotting” is used by all of the other mentally ill girls just like me. i’m using it anyway. it’s 3:21 am and I don’t care.]
i am definitely not opposed to the idea of decay, of steadily becoming a pile of dark mush, until there are wet worms crawling through my eye sockets, and then at least i would have offered something to the world.
wikipedia defines eight stages of death: pallor mortis; algor mortis; rigor mortis; livor mortis; putrefaction; decomposition; skeletonization; fossilization.1
as i move through my days, through my house, through the halls at school, down the dimly lit alleys in the evenings, i feel like i am a ghost, like i’m transparent, like i’m not fully a person, or i’m not fully living. i feel incongruous to everything immediately outside of my Self. and it’s as if the only purpose i have is to haunt; although i’m not sure exactly what i’m haunting.
nietzsche said something about how people generally wear masks in the company of others, but that an alternative strategy for social interaction is to present oneself as an absence, as a social ghost – "one reaches out for us but gets no hold of us"2.
maybe i am overwhelmed by my total lack of identity. my sense of self feels very vague, if not completely inexistent. i don’t know how i am supposed to be able to determine who i am. of course, i know what my features are, my situations in life, my likes and dislikes, my values, my relationships, etc. that is to say, i know what makes me consistent. but for some reason, knowing what makes me consistent feels different than knowing my identity.
“the spirit of an individual reaches its own absolute through incessant negation”3
fyi: i don’t know much about nietzsche. sorry. don’t quiz me on him.
this is a quote from the 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses. loosely, it means: ‘one can only become a true subject by accepting the void that one as a subject is, that is to say by not letting oneself be defined by the alluring but deceptive self-images or masks that cover up the void. it is only then that one, as subject, can attain some sort of subjective freedom as well as a true subjective desire.’ (this definition is not a quote from the film, however it is not my words; i believe it is from some article on the film, i had written this down in the journal when i had read it and i’m not sure exactly where I had read it.)