Fragments

Dark nights when I lie awake for hours, thoughts racing through my mind too fast to comprehend them, images, words, sentences over and over as if stuck on repeat while a TV plays static in the background. "Am I really losing time when the clock can not keep time? Time is not linear, do not try and trap it behind hands and a face", "Existence is a fallacy", “I have four kids”...

Dark days when I sit outside my mind observing black and white images of people and places I don’t recognize roll past with frightening speed. Cherry red lips and dirty faces flash by, clicking like a slideshow from the 1920s. Voices tell me "Time is not linear", "I have four kids”. Photographs of imagined candles flicker and the ancient sepia tone tyre swing hanging from the oak tree of life in a garden I never had, moves ominously without wind.

I Blink. Photographs, more weathered faces, a brown dachshund dog Ive never met, the old lady, cherry red lips seductively whispering; I strain to hear but I can’t make out what they are saying. 

The explicit realisation that nothing makes any sense at all, where am I? 

Lost somewhere between reality and a dream and yet the clarity of that fact is so crystal clear that all the blurred lines vibrating around me suddenly come together, like a barbed wire fence wrapping around my body, tighter and tighter; taking my breath away. 

My breath short and shallow finally disappears and I can hold its emptiness in my chest, squeezing until the barbed wire around my body finally gives way and breaks, shattering like glass into the darkness, a thousand glittery shards flying away in slow motion. 

I blink, it’s just darkness, nothingness an empty, hollow reality. 

Blink again and cherry red lips, words, unintelligible sentences repeat over and over, a thousand radio announcers on talk back stations from around the world reveal one line from each of their stories and move on. Cherry red lips, that old woman from the 1920s, who is she? I don’t know her, yet she’s become so familiar. Am I her? Is she me? Is this my past or my future? Am I dreaming? What is real? “I have four kids.” I KNOW!! 

Who are these people what are their stories and why do they try and tell them to me over and over, each like a fragment of my splintered mind. Cherry red lips haunt me, why do they come back to visit? It is as if they are taunting my inability to understand their meaning. Perhaps they have no meaning at all. The matrix is unfolding on top of me.

Darkness.

I open my eyes and I am lying on the path in the fairy garden, I don’t know how I got there. The loud chirp of cicadas promising another scorching summers day. The pebble stones I am lying on are damp from last night’s rain, the tiny pink flowers vibrant against the background of the green pillar hedge illuminated by the suns rays. It is almost too beautiful, but surely this must be real. I can smell the warmth. 

I take a photo to prove its existence. What else is real? “I have four kids” Shut up, I KNOW.  

As I get up to walk into the house, I notice that my iPhone screen is now cracked and I don't know how, when or why.

Faded cherry red lips whisper seductively: “This will never end.”