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What Dissociating Feels Like

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There are moments when fear and agony grip me so tightly that to protect myself, I transform into a being powerful enough to feel only in fading colors.

When my bones are hollow like a bird’s and acid has spilled into all of the empty corners of my living corpse, there’s something beautiful about it. It’s awful. I know there’s something awful about this state from the vague unease fluttering in my abdomen, but I’m so calm. I’m so very calm that it’s like I’ve been lost at sea for days and have finally given up on being rescued. When my brain has become fog diffused through my skull and my breath makes me feel like the entire universe is a windy day, it’s not even existence anymore.

It’s a state of grace.

This is what I believe with certainty. Yes, this is what I believe, that God is taking me away from this place, that Mother Mary is reaching for me and I am close to Heaven, in a place just below it, reaching up and touching only cold smoke. Paradise turns to wisps between my fingers, and I am too calm to be disappointed.

A boat on the water.

A stranded sailor in the last moments before his death, when he is in the space between Heaven and earthly existence.

Beautiful terrible things.

A hollow peacefulness, like a doll’s painted smile.

But my dollhouse is a pretty place, and so I just stay, fading away into that sweet nonexistence.

It’s like the worst kind of horror movie.

The kind where I do not know if what I am seeing is real or imagined, beautiful or ugly, lovely or frightening or nothing at all.

It’s like living in a siren song.

My soul is there, I can feel it turned to pixie dust in my body, painfully noticeable, and it would be terrible to stay this way, me think, without any particular feeling but a peculiar misty sadness. It would be terrible to stay trapped in this porcelain vessel, lonely and lost in this blessed existence.

Pity the blessed, for they are frail creatures, wandering in their space behind the glass walls of my world and watching the zoo they can’t dream of touching and waiting to be freed.

It’s the worst kind of horror movie.

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Unsplash photo via Sunyu

Originally published: November 22, 2017
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