No Forwarding Address

A department in my brain has gone on strike. I don't know which it is and what its grievances and terms are. I just know that I have been sitting down trying to reflect or write the last couple of days and nothing meaningful is coming. My well is full but every time I dip in a bucket and pull it up, there's no water inside but sand.

The strange thing is that I can see it happening in real time. The observer is still online. Some arms of the government are functioning; I cooked, showered, made my ten o'clock appointment, watched TV, took care of the kids, my hands worked, the body showed up but the department that processes information is locked and there is no forwarding address.

Now a tree is just a tree. A TV show is just a show that actually holds and does not inspire an ounce of curiosity in me. It's just drama and I am living for the next scene, genuinely surprised about what happens next. I find it irritating that I am actually enjoying the show. The show is just a bloody tv show.

Conversations are even stranger. Someone asks me something, I hear the question, I start to synthesize it and then suddenly I freeze. The tab hangs like an old outdated android phone when you are about to pay a bill with google pay and everyone behind you at the grocery store is waiting anxiously for their turn to pay but the phone has decided to just freeze. I keep pressing the back button but it doesn't work so I just wait. Twenty seconds later the system reboots. I come back for a few seconds and then I am gone again mid sentence responding and I completely forget what we were even talking about. I ask the person to repeat what they said. They repeat. I ask again. We stare at each other for a while and somewhere inside I am watching this happen and I am asking myself what is going on.

What is happening to me?

I find it so unnerving that the observer hasn't walked out alongside the processing department. She is still here, watching the frozen screen, noting that it's frozen, narrating the whole malfunction in real time. Very strange. It's very unsettling that one section can go dark while another section sits there taking notes on the darkness.

I started writing on Substack because my mind wouldn't stop wandering. Substack for me is a tool that helps me catch my thoughts before they scattered but now the thoughts are there but they have split into so many directions at once that I cannot locate a single one. I am thinking about everything and nothing and I cannot tell what either of those things are. I can't write a beautiful sentence.

I took a nap thinking maybe the system would restart but it didn't. My thoughts followed me in my dreams and I could sense my body was asleep. I then noticed myself noticing that I was dreaming and the thoughts just kept going uninterrupted.

When I woke up, my tabs were still freezing and rebooting and I couldn't help but beg my mind to tell me what it needed from me so it could go back online. I didn't get a response no matter how hard I tried and I couldn't even send a mediator.

The worst part is that in my disorientation, I am still ok and can function like this for a while. I am scared. I want the annoying part of me that speaks in metaphors. I want the one who sees a door and instead of walking through it to see what's inside she just focuses on the pattern on it.

I am now here on substack negotiating publicly.

Hun, please come to the table and let's talk. Tell me what you want. Tell me what I did or didn't give you and I will pay it. We can work out the terms later. We can settle the debt on a schedule. I just need you back online because the queues are getting long, my eyes and spirit is tired and I am standing in this TSA line with all my bags and I would very much like to get through to the other side.

I miss you.