Real or not real?

Reality is difficult for everyone, especially those of us with marble imaginations, who can’t sit still at our desks, who want to dissolve into the night sky and laugh when we’re dreaming pastel. 

Psychosis grips me in its unforgivable hand, an iron stamp on my psyche, a gossamer wall between me and the other lives around me. 

It’s hard. Is the bowl of soggy cereal on the counter real, did my hand feign interest in it, did the wrappers under the fridge come from a Halloween party or the shades of creatures three dimensions above us? 

What about the indigo laughs of a really good drunk? The whispers you breathe into me when we’re wrapped in ice white blankets and the razor sharp of dangers and commonness is speeding towards us like a comet?

We all live in the common reality. The other realities, the other timelines are quantum leaps away, and difficult to access when you actually want to. The other realities snatch me away when I’m not looking. The one with demons, the one with realtors in gold suits, the one that’s backwards, the one that contains tangible fears, the one that seeps into my ears like black blood from a day old dead dog’s wound. 

I shake my head and send a ripple, a disturbance across the universe. It’s too hard to explain all of it, and it’s lonely when no one else sees the things you see. The frustration at not being understood, of carrying the weight sits at the bottom of my stomach like thunderclouds at the horizon. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m dying to unleash what’s in me. 

Sometimes I need to take a breath, take a day or two, hit reload and refresh like a computer whose circuits have gone bad. It’s a problem, feeling too much or absolutely none at all. The parallel planes shift. I either love you to madness, or don’t care whether you live or die. 

How do I reconcile the smile of a stranger with the evil grin in my mirror? I gather lifetimes in my bones and hoard compliments and spit out secrets. Is my life upside down? I feel like Alice after she’s come out of the rabbit hole, now what? Nobody ever talks about what happens after a visit to Wonderland.

I go round and round, like a satellite, in the search for truth and what’s real to everybody, that I can pretend, just the other humans, just another black umbrella in the rain. 

I want to be there for you, I want to care about what’s going on down here.