Isolation

Heidi walked up the staircase in the dark. In the cold, the usual 9 p.m. silence seemed to grow louder and the single light that hung from the sloping ceiling shone less. The bulb was running out. Her sweater clung to her skin vehemently- it was hard not to feel the coldness going through. It seemed to creep inside, and turned one arctic and sharp. It gave one the edge that icicle daggers accumulate from being in the cold for too long.

Heidi had read in a poem once, ‘People are made of places’ and wondered what her room would make her, had already made her. The walls seeped of a condensation of thoughts that often accompanied loneliness. When one doesn’t know how to speak their minds the words repeated and re-repeated in the head often take a form of their own and walk out from inside to somewhere outside- they float. But mostly if you have a settled place and are not a wandering soul, they stick.

She unlocked the door and went in. It was a small room, it didn’t cost her much. The walls were a hideous green as if moss or fungi had caught wind of the cold and discoloured patches of the walls. She didn’t mind the lack of space or the existence of it; she just often wished that she had learnt how to not let things mould her. The room had made her a different person over the last two years. It had made her an island. She remembered Dmitry telling her once that no man really is an island. She wondered where he was now. She put her bag down on the table and sat down. She had business with the upcoming silence. The suffocating dark, the closed windows, the dead dark of the winter outside promised her a melancholia so deep, a look at insanity so close that she often doubted if she really wanted morning to arrive, for sleep to creep in, for the curtain of sanity to fall back over the dark spaces.

She switched off the lights and sat in her bed, huddling under her blankets. The crack would soon be wide enough for her to see things that others wouldn’t. No one wanted to stand so close to the precipice- after all one could easily lose their footing and be swallowed by the nothingness of the dark abyss.

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‘Who are you?’ she looked sadly at the girl. She was young with a pretty face. Heidi didn’t want to see her.

‘You have to help us. Help us! The building’s burning to the ground. Everyone’s inside the car! The car’s going to crash. It’s on fire!’

The whole thought disappeared as fast as it had come- the girl and her fire extinguished like a burnt out wick. Heidi gasped and jumped right up on her bed. She couldn’t handle it. The feeling was too ominous. Like she was disappearing into the slight splinter of her mind through which her thoughts had seeped out. She was being made a part of them, being made to disappear inside her brain. They spoke to her like this, in spastic bursts of overpowering images and let her know that they were no longer a part of her.

She sat quietly for the longer part of the night, talking to herself. She traced her palms and thought of death. There was a stillness in the dark outside which had so often brought in her a paranoia- she looked at the dark passively, unmoving. Not all attachments that were formed were done so willingly.

She couldn’t live without the constant thoughts of her smashed body run over by a car, the allure of smoke, drugs, the desire to throw her body around to anyone who’d take it, to inject herself, to cause physical pain- something, anything that would be a jar, a jerk, an electric shock that pounded her to a second of reality. She traced her palm, repeatedly, continuously and sometimes for a fraction of a second it seemed like it had worked, that her self had gathered itself and sewn itself back to the rest of her dismantled psyche.

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