January 9th, 2014.
There is an animal inside.
There always has been. Inside me, inside every cell there has been an overlap of sorts, a membrane maybe. I thought it was a chrysalis, but you can never really break free from yourself. You cannot become somebody who you are not, who you weren´t meant to be, who you never were. Neither can I. I am not breaking out. I am not becoming free. But I am becoming. I have been becoming myself for a very long time now and I suppose I will keep on doing that until I stop doing altogether. I don´t think it matters much what I am doing besides this one act. It all seems like embellishments, adornments and adding to a skin I already wear. Maybe I wasn´t looking closely enough, maybe I was blind to myself. Maybe my eyes can´t see the scales I am wearing; yet I feel their fire burning me.
There is an animal inside. It has raged, it has cried, it has torn at me. I kept thinking; let it out. It wants to be free. But I don´t want to be free. Who or what would I be if I weren´t this terribly chaotic and fringed capsule of memories? I would not be. Still, there is an animal inside. Clawing, hissing, crawling. Bustling, bursting, tearing. Desperate. Angry. Volatile.
People who know me very well always say I am so gentle underneath. In a way, that is all I am. Gentle and endlessly patient. Waiting. Always. Waiting. Dragging my claws along the ground, day and night. Holding my breath while trying to live. Living minutely on the edge of myself, avoiding mirrors. Barely audible, the tentative purring of my heart. There; revealing a clockwork barely human. Nearly animal. My eyes in the dark, adjusting to the setting light and whispering to quiet the ghosts beside me. Touching the world around me without seeing anything, shapes, shades, crooked doorways. A sensation of warmth, of slick scales clicking, deep fur settling, my heart pounding through the framework of the walls. Here I am. The animal. The animal inside of me.
There is an animal inside. There is a call like a song like the ticking of a clock like the sound of the years folding away neatly. There is paper in my hands, not yet yellowed but well on its way; crumbled and stung with words. There are bumblebees in my memories, nursing the flowers that grew from my inwards tears, hidden inside the neurons in my head; my mind is a hive. There are these things which we pretend not to be unspoken, there are these things which let us grab onto the years as they pass; sometimes I have the strength to name them. And then, when we arrive at destinations previously unimaginable, we discover that we´ve been here before.
There is a dream inside. The dream is sweet, tender and careful. The dream has a name; my name. Yet, it is not my name. Just the name I wished I had, the name that I was supposed to become; tender like sunshine days on the crooked hill in the old garden my dad had yet to sort out. But before that time, the years grabbed him and dragged him down. My mother got to him first. Soft and broken. Careful and sweet; sweet were the berries hiding behind the thorns where only my child fingers could reach. Carefully I lifted them from their prisons. Carefully I broke their juices, crushed their wishes. Gave them to my dream.
There is an animal inside. And that animal bears my real name, bares its fangs at the passing day. In the silence of common life, the animal and I walk side by side, touch the same things, dream the same wonders; together we cry no more. The animal remembers everything clearly as I gradually fade away, folding my pain neatly. Stuck on a piece of paper, yellowing slowly; words stung by a life unlived, a childhood taken. There is an animal inside, inside everything. That animal can deal with this, that animal is strong enough. There is an animal inside me.