I haven’t written in a year. I’m sitting in a room of cardboard, brown light and silence. A soft music is playing. My medicine is inviting me to look around, to melt and shrink into a small thing. I’m afraid. Sleep hurts, that’s when the visitor gets me.
I’ve been living in a cardboard palace with no wall for a year. Just until I get better, just until the visitor goes away. Maybe flowers will grow up to my windrow, inviting me outside. Maybe a current of air will lift me out, or maybe it would be the visitor.
But only dust lives here. Dust from old memories. There is a strange comfort, a distance, like a church or a hospital ward that eats you alive. Sometimes, small currents of air disturb the papers, footsteps outside. Sometimes a cat speaks, from where the visitor stands out of sight. Nothing else knows of the cardboard palace, not even time. It doesn’t exist.
I’ve been living here too long. I can feel parts of myself peeling off. I don’t know how much has disappeared. I feel cardboard.
How do I leave?
