Solitary Confinement

***WARNNING***
This story is dark and describes vividly (I hope) a very black depression in an extremely personal way. If this will trigger you, DO NOT READ THIS one!!!!!



Solitary Confinement





I can’t do it. It’s too much. Every contact, every interaction is just one more burden heaped on top of an enormous load that presses down on me, a weight I stagger under. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, eventually I crumple. It’s so easy for other people, those outside of me, to mouth platitudes, “stop being lazy, quit being a baby, suck it up, act your age, toughen up, just push on through, take baby steps, take it one day at a time.” If only it were that simple.

No amount of explaining makes it clear to all those people who live outside my skull. In here, inside, where I’m alone and no one can reach, it all makes sense. Life, everything about it’s too hard. Everything is. I can’t even commit suicide, even that is too hard.

The pain. I can’t describe it clearly. I could say that it builds up from somewhere down in the deepest darkest places of my soul until the pressure is too much and it explodes upwards, out into my body. A deep dull ache that rolls up out of the pit of my stomach and washes over my chest in hot pulsing waves, making me dizzy, until I sob myself sick and wake up hours later wrapped tightly around my own stomach on the cold dark floor of the bathroom. I could say that, but it would only be words, and words can’t ever truly express the reality of it.

The isolation. I’m alone in here. It doesn’t matter how many people surround me, I can never be anything but alone. No one sees into my prison. No one sees into my soul. Standing in a crowd, I look around and see countless faces, one blurring into the next. I hear a cacophony of voices, coughs, snuffles, grunts, gurgling stomachs, stamping feet. I am reminded of a herd of cattle; an acrid reek of manure fills my nostrils and I taste dust in the back of my throat. I scream out in my mind, shrieking to be free of the stifling desolation of the crowd.

I don’t pray. What is there to pray to? Instead I meditate, I picture my connection to everything. I meditate on the connection of all things to all other things by an invisible thread of sameness. My silent chant: All things are one, all things connected, all things made up of the same building blocks. I picture distant galaxies, suns, planets, and moons, all made up, at their very core, of the exact same building blocks that I am made of. I feel the breath pulled deeply into my lungs. It becomes a part of me, and as I exhale it takes a part of me with it out into the world for others to inhale and incorporate into their own being. I envision the food and water that I ingest. I think of where it comes from and how it becomes a part of me. I imagine myself returned to the earth, buried and decomposing, becoming one with it. I think of how this planet will one day return to the Star Dust from which it was formed. Alone inside my own soul, I feel my connection to the rest of the universe, for just a fleeting second and then it’s gone. For that brief moment I’m not alone, the entirety of the universe exists within and around me.

My husband. I’ve tried to explain it to him so many times. He nods, and smiles, and tells me that I’m not alone. He meditates with me and tells me, “all things are connected and one.” He says he understands and he says he “gets it.” He asks me why I’m so sad, how anyone who is so “spiritually aware” can be so sad. He calls me the most spiritual person he has ever known and says that’s the reason he loves me so much. But it doesn’t bother him that he’s locked outside of me, forever unable to reach the core of me, the essence of my being. He doesn’t even know that he is. He is closed to me, a giant iron door. All my efforts to reach him amount to little more than the bashing of my fists against that door. I can’t imagine a fate worse than being forever locked away from the ones that I love, forever unable to reach them.

If only I could imagine that I had never felt that connection. If I could bury it down in the depths of my subconscious mind, that hidden place where most people store such things, then I could face life. I could stand in a crowd and speak aloud. I could be seen and heard. Instead I know that I am not meant to be alone inside my head. I know we are, all of us, meant to be connected to one another and no one was meant to be locked inside their head. Skulls, like prison walls, are molded to precisely squeeze the very essence out of ones being, to compress it and hold it pinioned forever in place. No one was ever meant to have their soul locked inside their chest, an angry bird forever beating its wings, in futility, against bars of flesh and bone. But how do I explain that to anyone? I try, but it’s hopeless. No one hears, no one understands.

Words. Empty, hollow, physical expressions invented to approximate the contact our souls yearn for. How pitiful it is, speaking of the things we feel, a pale wisp of an excuse for communication. I reach out with words and try to touch those around me, to move them, to reach their souls. How sorry an attempt it seems. To wrap my soul around my loved ones and embrace them with it, to mingle our hearts and minds, to truly know one another; that would be truly knowing someone. But it never happens. I know it can be done, I even know how to reach out, how to open myself, but no one else does. They don’t even try.

I don’t know how to carry this burden. I don’t know how to shoulder the weight of this knowledge. Knowing that I am connected to a universe of closed souls, knowing that I am one with a million hearts and minds that I can never reach and never communicate with, this must be what hell is. This is what will kill me, the loneliness.

Every night my husband curls his body up against me and wraps me tightly in his arms. He whispers words of love in my ear, insubstantial half-truths. How can he love me if he doesn’t know who I am? How can he know who I am by only seeing my actions and hearing my words? He has never mixed his soul with mine, never opened his mind to me nor entered mine. He has never fingered through the memories and emotions locked up inside my skull. How can you love someone fully, wholly if you have never done these things? Every night I lay in his arms baring my soul, flinging wide the doors of my mind, inviting him into me. He comes closest to entering me truly when he enters me physically. I can feel it when we make love, the ghostly feather caress of his soul brushing against mine. It never lasts more than an instant. That instant is a tantalizing glimpse. Those fleeting instants of contact are a reminder of how trivial physical contact is.

I’ve never known my mother, or my father. They are there, at the other end of a phone line, or across the table at a Christmas dinner. They smile and speak. They hug and utter pale words of love and concern. They aren’t real to me. They’re two-dimensional, nothing more than paper dolls. Inside my skull and deep within my soul they are insubstantial. I can remember how it was before I knew I was locked inside a prison of meat and bone. They were warm and real. Their words soothed and comforted me. I loved them, or thought I did, before I knew that real love doesn’t exist in a world where no one can ever know another living soul. Now I understand just how far I am from knowing anyone, even the woman of whom I was once a physical part. I was once an extension of her body, a tiny piece of her that she imbued with an ounce of her soul to create. That knowledge is what gives birth to the anguish that fills the depths of my soul and crumples me up on the cold dark bathroom floor, late in the night.

I no longer have “friends.” What’s the point if I can’t know them? I used to have friends, people I had known for years. They were people whose lives I had shared, whose children I had diapered and helped to potty train. Some of them I had known since childhood, some I had shared the joys of marriage and childbirth as well as the anguish of divorce and the loss of death. Now those relationships seem empty, that sharing seems false, shallow. How can I “share” joy or sorrow with someone without reaching into their soul and feeling their joys and sorrows as they feel them? Their physical absence in my life causes me far less pain than their presence did after I realized they were locked away from me.

I won’t see my family again. Seeing them hurts too much. Watching them embrace each other, feeling their touch on my skin as they embrace me, it’s more than my soul can bear. The shadow of love that is all I can ever feel for them now crushes me. They won’t understand. It will hurt them and they will tell me again that they love me and try to offer me the solace of “understanding” and tell me that I am only depressed. My mother will tell me the name of a good therapist and suggest that I try anti-depressants. She’ll probably tell me how much therapy and medicines have helped her. My father will be analytical. He will tell me stories of his younger days, soul-searching and metaphysical experiences. Stories of how acceptance of life as it is leads to inner peace. But these things haven’t opened their minds or their souls to another single living creature. They remain locked forever inside their own skulls and blissfully unaware of their imprisonment.

I am grateful for only one thing, I never had children. To not be able to reach into the mind and soul of a being who I gifted with an ounce of my own soul, who I grew within my own body, who I created out of the very essence of my being, that knowledge would kill me. It would suck the last tendrils of life from my soul and unlock the walls of my skull, flinging my mind out into the cosmos. Maybe that would not be so bad, maybe not having children to kill me isn’t something to be grateful for at all.

Perhaps this knowledge is what has led men to become monks, take vows of silence, and cloister themselves away. Perhaps this is the knowledge that drives women into convents. Being physically alone makes being truly alone a little more bearable. The presence of souls that I cannot touch is like slipping beneath the surface of a calm pool and drowning, the crystal clear water closing over me, my lips quivering, reaching for the cool fresh air that is just out of reach.

I will leave my husband. He won’t understand. He’ll be crushed and confused. Maybe he’ll beg me to stay, or maybe he’ll scream and curse. I will tell him that the faint whisper of love without the substance of contact is killing me slowly. He’ll think I’m saying it to be hurtful, that I’m accusing him of something heinous. He won’t “get it.”

Being alone in this house, surrounded by the city is too painful. I am alone amongst a sea of people: strangers wearing familiar faces and bodies. I am alienated by the closeness of people who think they know me, souls that I have never known and will never know. The nearness of them presses against me, squeezes and compresses me. I feel my skull shrinking, the walls of my cell closing in, strangling the life from me, blotting out what pale color still exists for me.

I left the city. I sold the house. The mountains offer solace, solitude. I bought a house up high, far from people and free from the isolation of their presence. I spend my time meditating. I will achieve a connection, something real, substantial, and more than merely fleeting. I will lose myself within the oneness of the universe, become one with everything that ever was, is, or will be. I will escape my skull and truly know those who I have loved without knowing, and they will never know it. Their lives will go on, without me. They will think I’ve lost my mind, perhaps they will think I have killed myself. Maybe they will even come looking for me.

It’s good here, peaceful. There are no unreachable hearts or minds here to isolate and dishearten me. I will stay, alone in my mountain home. I will spend my days and nights exploring my connection to the universe. I will expand my mind and soul. I will sail along the dips and curves of my soul. I will learn to embrace my own being and perhaps in doing that I will learn to merge myself with the oneness of all existence.

It’s beautiful, the universe. I can feel it best at night. When the world around me sleeps, when the souls of the world loose themselves from their bodies and wander freely in dreams I can feel them, brush up against them and, briefly, know them. The stars pulse in my heart, the wind floats in my soul, the oceans crash and flow in my mind. Cosmic winds tug at me and I soar through them. I have never truly known any living person outside of myself. I can know the universe and I will one day be free of this flesh and bone prison. Maybe that’s enough. I think heaven must exist, I think it’s a spiritual place where all the souls of those who were and all those who will be mingle and are one. I can’t know those souls yet, but one day I will, and for now that’s enough for me.