Under the skin.

The names change and the people connect during life, but the consistent rambling trench of the psychotic sits deep within the depths of the human mind. Laying dormant and tranquil until the silent steps rummage through from one corner of your mind's eye to the other, echoing with glee as you brace yourself for instability. It’s all a game and one I fear I’m losing.

I always knew life wouldn’t be normal, how could it ever be? From my sporadic inception to my ghastly birth, I was nothing more than a burden. My Mother found it near impossible to conceive children and for my life to remain possible she had to take supplements and rudimentary medications to make it through the day and even then it was a struggle. She sometimes speaks with a slur of those times, she describes them as “dark and ominous”. She was never sure each day whether I was just going to pack my bags one day and leave her womb. I still apologise to her for that every Mother's day.

However, life does have a way of continuing. I grew up in a state of naturally occurring transitions through time and space with out any narrative, just a directionless force moving forward for the first seven or so years of life. It was pleasant I imagined, never having those perverse thoughts, being able to trust whatever your parents say. It was probably the most fun I've ever had, simply because I don't remember it. Then consciousness just happened one day, suddenly I had a past and a future, I was aware of what I was doing and what I was thinking and I managed to cope for a few days. But, as some people know, not everyone was made for reality. Certain abnormalities grow to cause problems.

My interests from a young age were ubiquitous. I would sit solemnly with the other boys and chat haphazardly about the football on the weekend, biting my nails incessantly and hoping never to catch anyone’s eyes. I’ve never liked eyes, they are the deep oceans of which I always tend to float. The soul, just careless and overt in front of me broods a stale response and subsequent shrugs of the shoulder. I’d quickly grow tired of other’s company, seeing it as a personal vendetta against my personal space. They bored me excessively with talks of television and books, it was all very cliché and even at that age I knew I had things wrong, I was the boring one but what could you do? I just longed to live in the subconscious once again, to return to the esplanade of my previous life, carefully observing the lucent portraits of my inner most thoughts, the things that didn’t make me drowsy or apathetic. And I did.

I learnt to disguise my discontent with mundane life by interrogating my brain, by finding those doors of perception and steadily seeping them open. I’d think of those much greater than I in a fictional paradise, pertaining to slim men with dark sunglasses standing by the pool discussing all the facets of life in urbane jackets and with the Queen’s English. Oh, how they spoke so elegantly, I wish their voice was mine. Every day I begged that those thoughts scraping from beneath the mire could one day project from my larynx with the harping hum of a big band, and that finally people would find me interesting. I guess I was lucky, I at least knew the voices were my own. They never dictated or asked questions but simply flowed lucidly with the effort of a dog chasing a stick. If only I could tell myself back then that it was sensible to say those words, instead I hid them.

As my age increased, so did my social awkwardness. I now couldn’t think of looking people in the eyes, and that premonition still remains, I try hard to stare at the face…but not the eyes. Every night when I go to sleep with heavy eyelids and surplus energy I see all those pairs of eyes staring me in the face with the sharp glare of confidence and acceptance in themselves but not me. My weight ballooned and I stood on the fringes of friendships, gently going about my business, casually mentioning my thoughts but I was too much of a shadow, very much an afterthought and sometimes the invisible man. I’d console myself late at night that it’s not others who should accept me, but I should accept others and my stray through the norms of society that would persist for the rest of my young teens still seem but a blur of conglomerated confusion and despair.

But as time does tell, my internal monologues of the spring and the sea were re-entered and this time they seemed natural, an extension of my voice and not a detriment of my mental health. I suddenly preyed on the ability to jumble words and sentences in a wholly chaotic but organised manner, the world seemed colourful now, no longer confined to the skid row of abnormality. A fleeting relationship with a humdrum and slightly overweight girl started during these periods. Her presence in my life dissolved part of this new confidence, her persistent bombardment of irreverent compliments and piteous questions made me full of ire, but I still went out with her. For a long while I thought I'd lost my ability to think once more, that it had burnt out under the breaking dawn, never to frequent again but to remain trapped in the planes of consciousness that were unobtainable.

I met each new day with a groan of morose, I thought few and far between about anything. The body and the soul joined in one perfect monotony that just sailed straight ahead without direction, a walking zombie, nothing but a crossed out name. Having only attended an all boys school, the opposite sex seemed dangerous and manipulative, nothing but anomalies, but ones that incensed sexual prowess and courtship, the trend of feeling alone slowly set in once more and I become reclusive in terms of relationships after my one failed attempt. But of course, this revelation of women wasn’t met with hostility by everyone, in fact once more I was the exception and not the rule.

My semblance of being in the throes of society were dashed away and once more I found solace in just talking to myself, thinking of abstract scenarios where I was dominant but it was all pulp fiction and I knew that the times of living in my head and not in the world had to end soon. University strolled around and I was positively elated when I found out I was living with fifteen other boys, hoping that the playwright material of love and war were to be absent from my domain for as long as possible.

However, things never work out and I was tossed into the lion’s den with nothing but a pencil and my perspective. I took upon the role of an observer when possible and watched how others dealt with situations of which I might be expected to recoil, slowly building up an omnibus of knowledge and ascetic mannerisms. The time came when I had to let those voices out, the time came when I had to stroke a girl on the back and tell her I loved her, the time came and went. In an instant I realised the suppression of years worth of sexual anxiety pouring out in one block.

I had no handle on what to say, what was appropriate and what was expected, I had nothing but my narrative, which I spilled to anyone willing to listen. I suspected during this time that a few people had orthodox infatuations with myself, from the way they fumbled carefully about what to say, to the stroking of long plaited hair, fear feeds fear and I would routinely break down in the midst of conversations. Refusing to talk further or altogether leaving, the pressure of such subjection made me feel under trail, sat in the defence against my crimes to nature, preventing the courts of justice on what was surely meant to be procreation. A few remained but most left after my narrative become pathetic and piteous. Almost out of habit I’d lay there with my head in my hands smoking a crude roll up, pretending I was just a romantic, never one to be understood but chased. But the chasers were running dry and I never could write poetry.

The wells of my creative spin-doctoring in altering my perception of shyness to tortured genius now laid barren and all I had to console myself with was myself, a vicious circle with never loses momentum or dictation and one I feel will never cease. The vicious circle of loving your own voice more than others.