Summer has been hard on me

some barely coherent paragraphs from my journal

I’ve recently been feeling these frenzied surges of anger boil within me, for reasons either too banal or too indistinct to be perceived by anyone else. I’m either oblivious to what everyone else finds obvious, or painfully aware of what no one else seems to notice. Balance has always been conspicuously absent from my life. It feels as though everyone is born with a built-in scale, one that somehow weighs both their heart and their mind together. But me? My scale has always been torn apart. My heart has teeth, it bites into things and refuses to let them go. My mind, on the other hand, cannot be persuaded to stay anywhere for too long. The vessels making up my brain are so loose they unravel and spread wherever they please. My heart clings too fiercely, and my mind wanders too freely. Together they’ve made sure no scale could ever hold them.

Anyway, these spikes of anger have become recurrent, and I can’t seem to trace their cause. Perhaps it’s the heat. It’s melting away all the facades, all the presumptions, all the memories, and with them, my sympathies. Olivia Rodrigo’s album is playing in the background “tell me something honest so the memories turn dark, memories turn dark.” Yes Olivia, thank you for making this song. Memory is a chasm in the brain. You’re walking down memory lane when your foot slips and you fall inside. Lava oozes from within, turning the meadows to ash. One wrong step and suddenly all the effort you’ve spent adorning the garden with flowers is annihilated in a fleeting moment. The blackened remnants decay, and the vultures arrive to feast on whatever dared to remain. One small misstep and you’re seventeen again, bargaining with the world to be just. But never mind, the world stayed the same. Somewhere along the way, we became more like it.

The weather is too hot and my brain has returned to the default emotion it knew at seventeen. Anger. The heat has stripped everything bare before me. The world has shown its true colours, and people have shown their true faces. I don’t want to be surrounded by people. I am so overstimulated even the air feels crowded. Being alone in my room isn't enough, I want to be alone in the world. I want every trace of everyone to disappear for just a while so I can untangle the knots inside my brain. I want to be surrounded by me. sarahs and sarahs, thousands of sarahs. sarah everywhere. sarah on the ground. sarah in the sky. sarah on the left. sarah on the right. sAraH. SaRah. sArAh. pardon my frenzy, I have a habit of recording myself losing my mind in words.

My hands smell of ink. Even the pages are tired of me. Day and night, with trembling hands, I keep on writing the same old sentences. I am a loser. Where am I? This room that looks like mine, but the walls lean closer every night, as if they’re listening. The curtains sway when there’s no wind. I swear they whisper my name. sArAh. I laugh. At least I think it was laughter because what else can you do when even the furniture starts pitying you. I tried to stop yesterday. Closed my journal. Locked it in a drawer. Told myself I’d sleep. but when I woke up, it was on my pillow. My tiny scribbles across the page. I don’t remember writing those words. Yet they were. Redder. Angrier. Maybe I sleep-write now. Or maybe I don’t sleep at all. Where am I? Not in this body. Not fully. I look in a mirror and flinch. Because the reflection blinks a second too late. Almost smashed it today. Some days I forget why I started writing. I just know I can’t stop.

I am tired. I rest my head on the headrest of my chair and look at the ceiling. I have my glasses on and everything feels clear and sharp, I can even see the direction of the paintstrokes on the ceiling. I keep staring. I zone out a bit too much. Now I can see stars and synapses and soliloquies written in scarlet ink. I scream and scream and scream until my voice starts cracking the ceiling and reaches the sky. I traverse through the skies, the strong acidic winds no harsher than the weather I’ve left behind. I land on Venus. I’ve always found this planet very interesting. It makes me think of 7x7-49. The heat, the time, everything about this planet is very intriguing to me. Perhaps it’s the heat.

Why is the epitome of heat considered to be more intense than the epitome of cold? Why is it hellfire and not hellice? Perhaps because the fire burns and screams, it is raw, it is honest, it is like me. I like to think it was the heat and the orange of Venus with has pushed out the cold and blue of Pluto away from the solar system. The world is built on dualities and opposites, but just a slight imbalance can cause destruction.

Heat is always stronger than cold. It overpowers it. Just like the heat of feelings overpowers the cold of logic. We think logic is what makes us see things clearly, but only the heat of feelings can strip things down to marrow and show us truths unfathomable to logic. The things which shape us most profoundly will never justify themselves to reason. They simply burn. They burn until even love starts to smell like smoke and you start flinching from every trace of warmth, mistaking it for fire.

How miserable I have made my life. Eyes heavy with sleep and hands typing into what I think will be my salvation. If only the words didn’t rise like phantoms in the night, drinking my blood for daring to summon them with such impure hands. my blood curdles with envy as I stand at the crossroads with my bow drawn and arrows aiming at all those who are firm in the direction of their lives. Here I am, marooned upon the shore of my own indolence, where the carcass of Icarus washes ashore each morning to laugh at me. I bury it with ash and drape it with a pall before it can mock me. The serpent of pride coils around my heart with every passing day. But my own hissing is louder than the serpent. It sends both serpents and people retreating alike. Wasn’t this my dream? Solitude. Silence. Now it’s thrust into my mouth in spoonfuls until I choke on it. Pride, indolence, envy, shape — this is my palette, the colours of my choice. And with them I’ve painted nothing but grotesque portraits of the devil. And if I look long enough, I can discern faint vestiges of the artist beneath the dark glaze. So I gather my palette of vices in a warm embrace and walk towards my pyre, where the last portrait to finish is my own.