I’m wondering if i was really ready to leave. The Hospital. High School. The Womb. I am at once an intellectual being of savvy motivation and a blubbering mess — a mess of white noise and disorientation. Talking doesn’t seem to be working. I open my mouth and words come out like twisting kudzu vines, intent on covering over my tone, intent, and meaning. My words twist themselves in fumbling green shoots spreading out from me, at once repelling and rooting me where i stand.

My associations are tangled. My mother is floating on the periphery of my life again, wheedling her way in as best as she can down my through, into my stomach, twisting my insides into hard knots that do not come undone. But i am tugging, pulling my guts this way and that hoping that something will give. No one makes sense. I can’t explain my weekend to anyone in anything but stuttering halting words. They all blankly tell me: “We were so worried.”

We. Not anyone in specific, really.

Plenty of people were worried sick about me the whole time, but i wasn’t … wasn’t worried about me, or about them, or about anything. Everyone who said that all blended into each other today. Not one of them were specific. That same wall that i thought was keeping me away from my city is suddenly all around me. I am in an aquarium tapping on the glass. Or maybe not. Maybe i’m finally outside, or maybe i was always outside. Every conversation i slide into i am separate from… the smart one, the sheltered one, the childish one, the one going absolutely fucking nowhere as fast as he can.

I want to find a way to be as numb as i feel, but there is nothing like it that i know. Except — on Friday i was coming back up from a haze of Diprovan sleep, and it was a perfect numb; i have slivers of seconds cupped in my memory while others have slid from them like mercury. Last night i wanted to feel that obscurity, that disconnected. If all you have are a scattering of pieces, you can put it back together any way you’d like.

I could actually pretend to be somewhere where i wanted to be.

Today i woke up and was back here, with my vision fuzzed and my balance a smear and several shades off of my normal self. Class was a blur, like the roadside seen from a car window. I spent five minutes of class just sitting in a bathroom stall trying to figure it out. I hung on to my perfect score in Theory class, and it didn’t feel right. I hemmed and hawed over auditioning and i did and it didn’t even seem to matter.

It was like i wasn’t even on the stage.