The isolation journals: Day 2 — terrible, thanks for asking.

Today’s prompt via Nora McInerny. Put yourself in a moment where you were not fine. Maybe you were terrible, and maybe you were TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Put yourself back in that moment when you lied. Why did you do it? Whose feelings were you trying to save? Write what you wish you would have said, and imagine where that honest conversation could have led you.

Did you have ever have a nightmare so real, so vivid, and so violent that you breathed a sigh of relief when you woke because it was just a dream, a shrivelled black seed from some repressed part of your subconscious you hoped never to tap into again?

Now imagine the reverse, where sleep is your salvation from a day filled with agony. That’s life with chronic pain.

Of course, the horrible, beautiful irony of it all is that with pain often comes an inability to sleep, and night after night after night of staring at shadows tangoing across the ceiling.

At first the shadows seem at a remove. You are, after all, fully aware they’re just a trick of the moonlight, creeping in from behind your curtain like unwanted but unobtrusive stowaways on another long, lonely journey through ‘till dawn.

21grams, so the internet attests, is the weight of the human soul. But for some of us, those of us who can only watch as the shadows slide from the ceiling and crawl between our sheets, laying on top of you like lead weights, it starts to weigh more. Much more.

By morning you’re battered, beaten, and exhausted. But the shadows are gone.

Until one day they’re not.

That’s the day you notice the shadows following you as you brush your teeth or take out the trash. And it’s not like some cliched spy movie where you suddenly catch them tailing you. These shadows don’t even try to hide, they want you to see they’re there. In fact, it’s almost as if the shadows want you to know they’re always there.

Eventually, the shadows stand directly in front of you. Intimidating bouncers refusing to let you access anything other than pain.

Joy? ‘Not tonight, sir.’

Excitement? ‘Members only.’

What life was like before the pain? ‘ID please?’.

It’s only then, when there are so many shadows you wonder how there’s any sun left to cast them, that you curse them out loud. And something remarkable happens.

The more you discuss the shadows, the shyer they become. They’re not gone of course, but they’re much more reclusive and cause you to stumble more by accident than design.

And suddenly you realise the damnedest thing.

They’re not you.

They never were you.

They’re just shadows.