The Scream

I am not sure if I will ever be certain about what a nightmare is. Having written about ghosts and spirits and so many things impossible, it is the imaginable that I cannot imagine. So often I am screaming inside but all you see on the outside is my poker face. I find darkness promising; every time I grope in it, it rewards me with something long lost — a memory; which I then turn into a ghoul or a mermaid, dab on it a few literary devices and it is no more me.

Sometimes I sigh, sometimes I live in my bell jar way too long and it is impossible for my contemporaries to recognize me, for now I am grotesque, a shadow of my past lost in the darkness that took care of me for so long. Sometimes, I am grotesque because I could not spill tears on time, and laughed when I should have cried. Sometimes, I am holding onto a twig when I thought I was holding a hand — both are shriveled, at least that is one thing they have in common. What if I am just a soul trapped in a giant body with glass buttons for eyes? What if I always was abandoned, and shadow is where I dwelt — sighing in my own sobs? What if I have stood numb for so long that I now am a part of the foliage — with shriveled brown skin cracking in places like an ancient paper not handled well? I think I can feel being torn apart, cracking like dry mud in the sun. I am parched and yearning for acid. It is torturous to see myself grow roots and bark where skin used to be; I am no more recognizable. It is like the spider of this world is spinning a web of reality around me, to trap me inside the possible, the 'real', the rational, the sane. I am their insanity, and I must grow roots — be kept from growing wings. I cannot be allowed to slosh in my imagination; the unicorn must die.

And here I am with a rainbow in my eyes and a scream frozen on my lips. My death is a seed for the next season of women writers, and they will be nurtured in the rain of my ashes.