My Prison

The crippling pull of my anxiety yanked me back inside my home. I stared longing out the window as the sun shone down in full glorious form and the neighbours laughed heartedly around their barbecues.

I had been invited to join them, my heart longed for it. A yearn that kept pulling me to the front door as my body begged to be involved. Yet my mind, in it's eternal self torment, always dragged me back kicking and screaming.

This tussle of life, an ever draining battle that waged within me. A fight to experience what it is to live against an unnatural urge to preserve my mind from imagined attacks.

With each day the turmoil tears apart my life. First my job let me go, then my friends stopped making all the effort. A folly attempt to pull me out of the house that turned into forgetting I even exist.

Last night I dreamt I was outside. Not just in a neighbours garden where I could still run home and hide, but actually in a park. I was walking through with a harmless dog, enjoying the sun before I sat down with my own little picnic.

There was a breeze in the air taking the edge of the suns hot touch and I closed my eyes to bask in its glory. I couldn't enjoy it for long as the beat of my dogs tails against my leg as excitement shivers through him brought me out of fake daydream.

A truly captivating woman, brighter than the day itself, playing with my dog. She looks up at me and smiles in such a way that it stayed with me long after waking up. A radiance emitted from her and pierced deep inside, staring me from my slumber only to bring me back to the dark and gloomy reality of my own prison.

Her face, an aching reminder of my solitary life.

I miss being touched. Sounds pathetic when you think about it. The simple touch of someone stroking your cheek or the embrace of their arms around you. These simple luxuries of love are so easily dismissed, until you do not have them. I will never have them now, I think that is what the dream was about. Loneliness, for the rest of my life.

I had an online therapist. She tried to put certain structures back into my life. Get up, make the bed, have a shower and get changed. Small little changes that I can add to overtime. Then she wanted me to go shopping. I ordered online, pretended I had been and saw how happy she was. I felt so bad, I cut contact with her after that and haven't tried a therapist since.

I seem to lie quite a lot now. I lie to protect people from the truth of my life. The emptiness. The fear. The depressing inertia that keeps me paralyzed in the comfort of what I know, even if it’s killing me in slow, invisible ways.

Since the therapist, it is just me. Me and the walls. Me and the silence. Me and my mind. I tell myself I will try tomorrow. I tell myself someone might check in or that this is just a phase.

The truth though, the truth is, I am rotting here. My body still breathes, but the rest of me has been withering for a long, long time.

I envy the people laughing outside. Not because they are happy, but because they do not seem afraid to live.

I stood by the door. Not to open it but to say goodbye to this prison I had built around me. To the hallway with the peeling wallpaper and the worn down sofa that has been overused as a bed when I couldn't bring myself to walk up a few steps to my real one.

I am writing a letter, as you already know as you are the one reading it. My final reach out to a society that does not even know I exist. I can no longer be restrained by imaginary forces. No longer held captive by my own thoughts. I spend my day talking to plants or dreaming about the lives of other people. Even my destructive mind knows that this is not a way to live.

It is time I did the only thing I can to get past that threshold. To break free once and for all and experience the wonders of the world.

As I go to step up on a chair, I will take the moment to sign this resignation of life with the last remnants of my damaged soul.

A swift jolt of the foot and I will be back in the park in no time, her face beaming brightly at me.

If you are reading this, be happy, for I am now free.