The Destruction Of Minds

If I stay silent, am I there? If I close my eyes, does the world outside my mind cease to exist?

I sit in the darkness, for that is when I think the best, and I need to think now. If I do not, I may explode from the sheer weight of them. I keep my door closed, and keep my closet shut, shutting out anyone who may be watching. I curl up in a ball in the middle of the room and close my eyes. The thoughts come at me, so fast I can’t understand them, but I get the feeling. They speak of dreams and wakefulness. They speak of real and imaginary. They speak of the power of the mind and the delusion of everything.

They say I have something, but they won’t tell me what it means. “Depersonalization.” The word is thrown at me like some kind of trajectory, said between nurses, between doctors, between family members. It glares at me from my case file. They let me look, because they know I don’t comprehend. It looms up from within my head with anger and sadness. They use other words too, words I do understand, but I don’t like them more; anxiety disorder is one of the favorites, hopeless case is another.

They let me have my own room, but that doesn’t mean much. They don’t want me to tell others the truth. They don’t want me to tell the others about the lack of proof, don’t want them to really think. I tell them it doesn’t matter, that the people I would kill the hope of aren’t real outside of this small reality. I tell them that they can’t do anything to me, that they can’t hurt me if I don’t want them to. “You aren’t real”, I tell them, and “I’m done wasting time, words, and thoughts on you.” They don’t see things the way I do, don’t see the lack of proof of existence. I ask them sometimes, “ How do you know that everything you see isn’t something your mind made up? That you aren’t asleep or in a coma or something else entirely?” They usually say something about dreams within dreams aren’t everlasting, or that they can feel pain, but that can be explained by the brain being bored. That is, if you can believe what we know to be true about brain function. I can make people go away by refusing to acknowledge their existence inside my version of reality, and I did that with a few nurses. They faded into the background first, and now I don’t remember anything about them, or anything about what they were.

They had me go to therapy, and I didn’t see the point, but I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went. The doctor was a strange little woman, she always has a hat on, and never takes off her jacket.

I enjoy making up stories about why she dresses this way as she tries to talk to me. Maybe it is because she is always cold. Maybe it is because…

“ Why do you never say anything when I talk to you? Are you mute?” She says it loudly, as if I were possibly deaf also, I look up from the view of my shoes and the floor.

“You are simply boring.” I say to her. “And you never ask the right questions.”

This seems to shock her, although because of my calm, sane voice, or the fact that I spoke at all, I cannot say. She looks down at the floor and her shoes, then tries to make eye contact. I hold no secrets in my eyes, so I meet her gaze.

“ You ask about my mental illness, about my friends and my family. You ask about my past, and you ask about the present. You never, however, ask about what matters and therefore you are not a very good doctor, and you bore me. “ She seemed even more shocked than before now, and she seemed slightly nervous… I might have raised my voice a bit too much while making my opinions known. I continue, with a soft calm voice again, no need to scare her.

“ I talk of the future, about reality and the nonexistent. I talk about the power of thought and the destruction of minds. What you say gets no reply, because the words you waste are not worth wasting my own. They do not matter.” I had finished in a near-whisper. She looks out the window now, unable to meet my eyes.

“Time’s up.” She says, and I can hear the slight shake in her voice. I nod, although her eyes do not see it as they stay away from me. I silently get up, and walk to the door.

“ I will see you next time”, I say, “and you should take off your hat indoors, it's not polite.”

I walk back to my room, and I sit on my bed. I have a little message board that the nurses put up. It has what I am supposed to repeat to myself written on it. Today’s message is : I am real. The things around me are real. I cannot control everything around me, and everything was not created with my mind. It is always a similar message, and I think it has to do with the words that ring out like bells from the minds of everyone around me. I go to the library, which is directly beside my room, and walk to the back. This is where Lily waits. No one else can see her, but I know that, I made her that way. I do not have hallucinations, nor do I hear voices that tell me to say and do things. My doctors seem to like asking me questions like that, as if they think I am actually crazy. ‘Schizo’ is another one of the words they are fond of using to describe me. I walk up to Lily, which is just an embodiment of my thoughts. She forms for me to talk to when there are too many thoughts for just one being.

I can’t always remember what my thoughts are though, because as I grab for one, it slowly dissolves. So I watched, as I often do, Lily melt away rapidly and grotesquely, as I try to grab thought after thought. In a few short moments in my reality, Lily is gone, and she begins reforming. I walk away for now… no use spending all my time trying to read into my thoughts, or I might go crazy. I chuckle softly to myself at that as I walk into the group room. Inside we have the usuals, a few droolers against the far wall, a few rockers with their hands around their knees, and a few ‘normal crazies’ reading or coloring, or whatever they do to pass time. I walked to the back of the room, in a nook, that just had a bookshelf and two beanbags. This is where my real friend sits, everyone can see him.

“Hey Ian.” I sit down next to him. He nods in reply, and this is normal, for he doesn’t see a need to speak most of the time. He has the same harsh words on his sheet, and he thinks like I do. Although, I’ve been told through the walls in the evening, that he is ‘ almost completely gone, and doesn’t have much time left’. I think he is good company, and we have a routine now, so there is no need to break it. I reach under the beanbag, and grab a book, and our notebook with our pen. We write down our thoughts and questions, but few answers are ever put there. We sit and read in silence tonight though, in mutual agreement to battle our overactive minds alone. After I finish my book, and he has been staring out the window for an unsettling amount of time, I try to contact him.

“Ian, I went to therapy today, and I actually spoke. Have you said anything to her?”

He said nothing, and didn’t even shift his blank stare out the window to acknowledge me. He gets like this sometimes, and there isn’t anything more I can do, so I place our things back, and stand.

“Bye Ian, see you tomorrow.” Nothing again, so I walk to my room, silent, my thoughts swirling whirlwinds in my mind. I open my door, close it behind me. Don’t touch the light, just leave if off for now. Close my closet, it always seems to be opening. Then I sit in the middle of my room, once again putting my arms around my knees and burying my head in my legs. The thoughts flew out as my eyes fluttered shut. They were too fast, as always, and they made no sense, as thoughts sometimes don’t when you don’t try to control them. They whispered in my mind, seemingly in the air around as well, about how nothing matters if nothing is real, and that there is no proof of anything. Tears fall from my eyes, leaving traces down my face. The tears flowed quickly as I started to think about how everything I knew may not be real. This happens often enough that I wasn’t concerned about being upset, or about

others asking me,

“What’s wrong?” because they know. Or they think they know. The tears stop as anger at them rolls into it’s place. Spent from intense emotions, I uncurl, and crawl into bed, pulling the covers over the top of my head, to keep everything out. Sadly, it also keeps my thoughts in.

The next day, I wake up incredibly late, and look at my board. They didn’t change the messages, but they wrote the time for therapy. I had about fifteen minutes, and I wanted to go today, to see what the lady in the coat and hat would say to me, so I got ready quickly, then started to walk. I got to her office and sat in my chair. She was sitting there, with no hat, and a heavy sweater instead of her usual coat. This was progress. Not much, I realized, when she started to speak about things that don’t matter again. She talked at me for a couple of moments before she thought to ask a good question again.

“ Am I not saying interesting things?” Finally she had caught on! I nodded.

“ Give me something to say then.” She should think on her own.

“Speak at least one word today please, we were making such progress.” She tries. I would double that, I thought, really “exceed expectations”, something they told me I could do. I met her eyes.

“Try harder.” I walked out then, no use wasting time if she wasn’t going to respond to that with more than a gasp, and went to the library. This was routine too, and I didn’t like to break those, so I went to see Lily. She was standing in her spot, looking rather see-through after last night’s thought session, followed directly by sleep. I nodded to her, and tried to grab a single thought, slower than usual, as if sneaking up on concepts was possible. They slipped away, and the pattern continues, Lily slowly starting to reform as I walked numbly to my room. I just felt numb today, and that happens sometimes, so I didn’t worry when I stopped caring altogether about everything for a few moments. I walked into my room, and turned on my light. Walked over to pick up clothes and put them away. Routine. I did this until my room was spotless, then I sat on my bed. I turned my head toward my message board, and the messages had changed, but I didn’t care enough to read them. I stood up and walked to the group room, same people, same places, routine. I sat down with Ian, and grabbed our stuff.

“ Hey, Ian. I said only two words today in therapy, but they made her gasp. What have you been doing?” That was a question I wanted the answer to. He sat in the same space, with the same clothes, as yesterday. This was odd, because Ian really loved clothes, always dressed to the 9’s, or whatever the saying is. He didn’t do anything, just sat there, unblinking, staring into the same space as yesterday. I sat there with him, but he didn’t feel like company anymore, he just felt like furniture. I glanced over to the rest of the group, and when I glanced back, only a small pile of ashes sat where Ian had been. Numb again, I calmly opened the window, and the ashes flew out. I nodded a goodbye to my friend. I then looked under his beanbag, and saw a note. It said simply,

“ Don’t try to catch your thoughts anymore. Promise.” Of course, he must have been crazy after all. I am too numb to heed his warning. I walk to my room to think again. This time, I don’t bother with the lights, or the door, although I do make sure to close the closet that had come open once again. My thought are faster than light, they must be, for I can’t even get the general idea of what they might be. I think and think until by brain shuts down, and I fall asleep.

I wake up, evening now, and walk straight to Lily, but something feels different. I start to run as I reach the back of the library, and I see Lily, she is like a ghost now, barely there, and as I try to grab the few thoughts that are left, and as I stare, she doesn’t come back.

I am too numb for anything to matter, too many thoughts for anything to have meaning, I walked back into the therapy room on autopilot, not routine , and my therapist was still sitting there.

She nodded, and said something that was worthwhile.

“I tried.” and then she slowly became translucent, and then transparent, then she was gone. I walked back to my room, the halls becoming black and empty behind me, as my numbness spread beyond my mind into my reality. As I entered my room, I didn’t touch my door, or my light or my closet, I just curled up and thought. I could feel the emptiness forming around me as I curled tighter, and tighter, trying to curl myself into nothingness. I thought, and my thoughts slowed down as the numbness consumed thousands of them every second.

As I sat and thought about everything in the darkness, I had a thought… a question I hadn’t thought of before...What if I wasn’t real, and I was just a part of someone else’s reality? I started to think of proof that I was real, and could find no more than there is proof of anything. I uncurled from my position, and looked at my hands. As I stared and thought, they started to fleck away, like ashes in a breeze, and then went my arms, and legs, and everything else. I had learned long ago that matter can’t be created or destroyed, and if that were to be believed, this wasn’t the end, this was just the beginning, of a new reality.