madness of the mad

Her and her madness:

Even though some people were certain she was mad, in truth she and her madness existed as two entirely separate things. Two different outlooks, two different tones of voice, two different souls.

The fact that no one could ever quite grasp that the two were different was one of the strongest proofs that clever people are, for the most part, fools.

Her madness lived somewhere inside her like a wild bird, and it appeared whenever it pleased, entirely outside her control. It had come and settled there independent of her will — perhaps it had even been born there.

If so, who had laid that egg?

The mother bird!

Just as everyone's mother is someone bigger than themselves, the mother of her madness must surely have been some other madness, bigger than her own.

If she'd had a doctor, perhaps the doctor would have said: the mother bird lives somewhere deep within the crowd outside, and she lays her eggs inside people.

Once upon a time

If it had been up to the Madwoman, she'd have kept the bird outside forever, of course — but that wouldn't have been best for either the bird or the Madwoman. And so the bird built its nest in those very magic words with which clever people begin the horrid tales they invent to frighten children: once upon a time!

Rose

The Madwoman's madness always began as a smile in her belly. The smile spread from the belly through the whole body like rippling circles on water. Or one could put it this way: it bloomed suddenly, like a great delicate pink rose with thin petals. And this blooming grew, spreading to cover everything, turning into a HALo that was life itself.

A sweet, sweet loosening in the belly. The eyes closing for a moment in awe. The cheeks rising, sliding up toward the eyes. A colorful snake waking at the tailbone. A cheerful flute-sound rising from the intestines.

The snake gliding upward through the spine to the flute's melody. Rising, kissing each vertebra one by one.

Coiling and nesting again in the brain.

Poking its head out from between the two eyes, opening its mouth, and out of its mouth a tiny bird flies. The color of the eyes and the set of the lips instantly change, become other.

The invisible waves spreading from the belly now reach the knees, the hands, the toes.

The scent of rose spreads across the whole world. Life becomes an act of coiling, gliding, flowing. Only that.

While It's coming

It's coming to take your place, unhappiness, when it comes. You know it. Like a distant smell, a meteor, a sound.

Like a fog bank

Like a lover

Like a chain

Come to wrap around everything.

You feel it rising, drawing near, settling in.
You already know all of it.
No screaming, no thrashing, no going mad —
you're so used to it by now
you just slowly turn your head toward the window and stare out blankly.

It's not that you're expecting anything from outside. It's more that you don't want to feel — the way a plane touches down (or crashes) — that moment of arrival.

You know, because
from that moment on,
you'll be left alone on an island of sensations.

You take a thin lock of your hair between your fingers and stroke it, top to bottom, again and again.

Like a slow, aimless masturbation, you slide first your right hand, then your left, again and again, from root to tip, soft, soft. The way you'd pity-pet a sad child.

Cold, cold. Slow, slow. Without purpose.

You don't want to leave the child alone in that state.

Since it's the only thing you can do. You turn your head back inside. Someone says something to you. Life has to go on as if everything's fine. A slice of fruit. Everyone actually knows everything. You know this the way you know your own name.

You know it now — you're unhappy. Like a fruit going rotten, you're changing state helplessly, all at once. You're waiting for what's coming.

Damn it, you think to yourself, just a few days ago I smelled so wonderful.

You're merging helplessly with something that isn't you. Your soul slips out and watches your body from above. However many thousandth time it is, you record — into your soul's black box, into the bones of your body — the collapse of the unhappiness-cloud onto you, its violation of your very existence, its taking of your place.

Why do you keep recording it?

You don't know.

All you know is that you're unhappy now.

Soulless.

Alone, even in the presence of others.

You take a sip of your tea and try to recall, inside it, the taste of the hope that just slipped away from you a moment ago. Since its going is still fresh, some trace of its taste, its scent, its color, still lingers somewhere in there, and it makes you smile a little.

Maybe it's the last crumb of an honest smile.

You try, for a moment, to catch this "last crumb of an honest smile" on your face — never knowing when, or even whether, it will come again — and to decide who at the table you'll show it to, but while you're thinking, it fades out, and you find yourself staring blankly at the person you chose.

You quickly avert this stare and pour it down onto your plate. You skewer yourself, bit by bit, on your knife and fork. You mince up, finely, finely, and eat the sour, blank stares you just poured onto your plate. One by one you eat the stares, the eyes, the face, the owner of the face, cutting them into small pieces. And last of all, you eat the state that brought you here, the excessive fullness inside you.

You ask yourself whether this fullness is old age. But it isn't, you know — you had plenty of this even in your first youth. It's not old age, you know. It's a wrongness. Not even a wrongness on its own, really. It's a wrongness that isn't yours. A person can maybe bear their own wrongness. This is the obligation of watching a wall covered in someone else's paintings, when you never hang a single painting of your own for fear of hanging the wrong one.

The taste of riding a train, by mistake, going the wrong direction.

The taste of a nightmare.

A star slipping from its orbit while someone far away (or someone very close) focuses their entire being on their own wish.

Knowing that even the grandest metaphors can't save you. Knowing that this old notebook can't save you.

Distress

Hatred

Some abstract monster you can't tell is distress or hatred, chasing after you and biting your backside, again and again.

Biting your belly.

Your neck.

Your fate!

Since there's nothing better left to do, you quietly attune yourself to how things are going. To the fall inside the rise. To the rise inside the fall.

Even though you know it by heart, the way you know your own name, you're still shocked at how quickly you arrive there.

All at once you're dying of unhappiness.

The tone of your voice changes.

The light in your gaze changes.

You eat out of unhappiness.

You drink tea endlessly out of unhappiness. You read the little fortunes on the tea-bag tags. You keep pulling your phone out of your pocket, looking at things. Your face starts to burn. Angrily, you put the phone back in your pocket. You find some way to go outside. Even if you invent fake goals, none of them really matter, so you give them up at the first opportunity — you change direction, speed up, slow down, listen to your breath — out of unhappiness your steps quicken, you want to run.

You want to run screaming.

A knot in your throat. Pressure behind your eyes. Tension in your jaw. A mild but never-ending cramp running through your stomach. You notice how bloated your belly is even though you've eaten so little. A strange taste in your mouth. You wiggle your toes back and forth and yawn. The ache in your back announces, smiling bitterly, that it has taken its place in the picture. Damn it, you're rotting. Once again, not knowing how long it will last, you settle (welcooooome) into a state you can no longer bear even for one more second.

From that moment on, you're rabid with unhappiness.

You go outside, and hate being outside.
You go home, and hate being home.
You meet someone, and hate being with someone.
You're left alone, and hate being alone.

The wrong train keeps moving forward.

You're moving away from yourself.

You cry from unhappiness.

Your tears retreat back inside you — the iron door slamming in your face reminds you that your capacity to cry was blunted in childhood — and you become even more unhappy.

You can't cry, out of unhappiness.

You call your mother.

Yes, everything's fine, we're managing, that's life, it goes on, this and that, good, good, good, how nice,,,,

You say hello to your father for her.

You throw yourself into a café that's trying to look middle-class but is helplessly stuck somewhere in between, just because it's empty. Since there isn't a single thing on the menu that isn't stupid, you order a stupid cappuccino. As you set your phone down on the table like a typewriter, you think about how deeply you miss — not the times you wrote in notebooks, but the reality those notebooks had.

You open your handynotebook and start tapping away. Watching the tram pass by through the glass wall, you wonder whether unhappiness gets recorded into the bones this way too. You lock eyes with a child pressing his mouth against the tram's window. A long look passes between you. Neither of you looks away. Worried that the unhappiness might pass from your eyes into that child, you smile a big, fake, mouthful of a smile.

You want to kill yourself.

22.04.2021 Essen