(Warning. This is an introspection piece and it contains graphic and unsettling imagery)

I compartmentalize. Sanitary little mind boxes meant to keep things separated. I’m sure I created the first one to keep me functioning when life and death got too big. It muffled painful things when it was locked away and I could pretend a normal face. Pretend, pretend and eventually you’ll feel it. But…I think the boxes are leaking.

I think they’re leaking because when I get overwhelmingly stressed, I go to a dark place…

And I have extra servings of worry lately. What are they? Suffice to say safety, sanity and survival for those I love most are pinging the top of the list along with a cumulation of swirling other exasperations to fill in the cracks.

Anyway, I think the boxes are too full … That or perhaps I’ve rearranged them so much the bottoms are breaking. I need to unpack them. Yes, I know.

See I’ve realized no matter what box I’m in, I’m missing my full potential. I’m incomplete. I’m a ghost shadow of what I could be. It’s a relatively recent realization and it makes me sad. But I wonder, in moving the boxes around in preparation of unpacking, have I allowed seepage to collect?

No. It can’t be. I’ve been trapped face down in a sludge of graphic images before. People with twin smiles who grasp their throats with hard realization and bodies cut deep to spill their inner secrets.

I turn inwards to escape the world and am greeted with a horror-lovers’ marathon. oh, fantastic. I don’t seek a horror genre but here it is waiting in the sacred place where thought collects.

The same mantra… Please…make the images stop, drain the poison from my mind. Do something with it.

Ah yes, the carnivorous carousel….and the blood pours bright red.

But I have used this venom to propel myself into better incarnations. Fling myself across the precipice to reestablish. Recreate. Fear of failing pales with what’s in my mind’s eye. I dress for battle. But I’m in a holding pattern this time. I must wait.

I hate waiting.

Perhaps I can use this creatively. Glimpses of hatchets with small heaps of bloodless feet. Yes. Creatively.

But where?

And why?

Yes, I’ve finally asked why. Why do I find this dark place. Why does it find me? Why does it hold the same template.

I remember waking.., cold sweat, afraid to move, hours before-elementary-school-started-pitch-black with yet another nightmare with my grandmother’s disembodied head in the yard. I remember… Squished and…

I feel squished… Like two massive hands work to press me flat like Playdough. Time to be reformed?Reshaped?

And I understand. I found a connection. A wild a-ha and resounding duh. The visceral blood thoughts and the sorrow and the worry… these are the legacies from and of my family when my uncle died and my aunt lost her jaw and I didn’t know if a killer would go free.

I made my first box then to hold the blood images and the shadow gunman who lived in my closet. And over time, I made others. They hold a myriad of ugly things. Some I’m afraid to open. But I know they hold hostage light and happy times too.

Like goes with like … and worry and overwhelm-ness goes in that first blood box and the memory goes…over there…in one of those hundred boxes….

I don’t want to put these worries in the box. Even for function’s sake.

I understand.

There’s a living tree, dissected and hacked, inside these boxes. My own personal tree of life. I’m not quite sure of its real dimensions … but I have in my hands a limb and a root. Their mine and I stand.

[Dark thoughts can be disconcerting and they can make life seem bleak. For anyone sinking into them I would suggest finding someone safe to talk to and to step back with the basics. Enough sleep, nutritious food, stay hydrated. Walk, dance, do something for your body’s natural feel-good endorphins. Journal. Paint. Breathe. Be your own best friend for a bit. Take things in moment-bites. Let go and let God. Know things will get better. Eventually. Live.]