Soaking in the bath I rubbed my skin with a homemade oil scrub made of ginger, cinnamon and a cheap saffron substitute tasting nothing like the original. It smelled like Christmas. A luxurious Christmas marinade, to rub onto meat before a barbecue.
It started way back when, somewhere between childhood and adolescence, during the time when I believed and applied a method of happiness based on effort. I reasoned that one can believe oneself happy or force yourself to smile and happiness follows. I spred joy around me and people asked me often “how is it that you are so happy?” I suppose that is one of those things that seems so appealing and perhaps even doable when the heart is young. But life is a smorgasbord and it does not take long before you get pied in the face or the shrimp cocktail upsets your stomach.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. True enough, but the problem with this nonsense is that you need sugar, even the metaphor acknowledge that. Lemonade made solely on lemons, will remain just as sour, liquid or not. So what is the sugar of life? What makes life sweet? I have a soul to sell if anyone offers some. Heck, I probably would even settle for aspartame right now – “fake it till you make it!”
I am a strong person, to many obnoxiously so, but like all people I learn it the hard way. If you rub your skin it thickens to keep it from blistering. The soul show similar defence mechanisms and for each time the heart breaks it grows back together harder, just like bones. And breaking my own heart is my specialty, believing too much of other people together with my ‘chronic overachivement’-iosis.
It has come to this point in which I loath myself. Not because I am strong, but because it is not true. Weakness and anger seems to be the entire constitution of the shell that once was built to keep me safe. The me that was on the inside. I trapped myself in a prison, not a haven. Inside its walls I lost most of my principles, my faith, hopes, dreams – if I had any, I do not really recall. Instead my rudeness has taken new heights, my impatience is no longer exclusively exuded on myself but on everyone and I care naught for your problems. Filling me with equal parts relief and dismay. “Fake it till you make it?” The battery for that cognitive mechanism ran out. It seems that my personality trait of escapism, have been successful. I seem to have escaped myself. Perhaps I am lost wandering somewhere else, or maybe I simply died.
For years I was fighting for that last part of myself that rested somewhere on the inside as a pebble. That last piece no-one yet had stolen nor myself broken. Half of it I wasted in some feeble suicide mission and the remains slowly started to fade by themself. Half a pebble is not enough to provide energy for a whole being. The machinery started falling apart. From the chimney black smoke oozed in increased volume, from the outlets toxic goo poured poisoning myself and everyone around. It would be a fascinating feeling were it not so personal.
In my prison cell I spend many nights either back in the insomnia that defined many a night in my youth, or with the nightmares that defined my young adulthood, or I simply sleep too much. My appetite eloped together with much of my body mass. Leaving me conflicted as I look better unwell than ready for battle.
Maybe it is a soul cleansing, a rite of passage necessary to remove all the buckled up garbage that clogges my soul, a cathartic burning to produce fertile soil for seeds to grow. So bring out the torch and matches, a bitchburning is about to take place, marinated and all!
Only it leaves me wondering that when the filthy flesh burned off, will a phoenix rise from the ashes or is the me I was, simply lost.