Everyone who meets her calls her brilliant. Some even say she’s gifted. But it’s hard for her to believe it when everything she does feels so chaotic. Her room is a mess. She’s lost everything she owns at one point or another. And all those successes she’s praised for feel haphazard, like everything just accidentally fell into place and she happened to be standing beside it to take the credit. She hates when her work is applauded, because she can’t feel pride. Instead, she feels like an imposter, a fraud. She hates the way the guilt stabs at her from every direction in the face of a compliment.
Lately, things have been getting away from her. Deadlines slip like sand through her fingers. Mistakes pile up higher than the socks on her bedroom floor. She was late on last month’s credit card payment, and she forgot to wish her best friend a happy birthday. Her mind has become a heap of nonsense and misinformation, and she has to sift through all the junk to find what she wants…if she doesn’t get distracted along the way. She feels helpless as all those compliments she used to hate start to disappear. People are taking notice of the overlooked details, the minor mistakes, the little inconsistencies. She wonders how long can she go on like this before her reputation is tarnished forever.
It’s clear that she needs to make a change, and she finally decides to do something about it. She needs a fresh start, a new outlook, a mental reset so she can start to rebuild. When she gets home, she does her laundry and pays her bills. She even cooks herself a proper dinner, one that isn’t made in the microwave and uses up those vegetables she almost let go to waste. She runs a vacuum over the floors and sighs with relief. Her house is back in order. Now she just needs to get herself back in order.
She draws a bath and slips in the tub. Here, there are no phones, no fidgets, no distractions. All she hears is the shouting of her overwhelming thoughts. She closes her eyes and tries to quiet them one by one. For the first time in years, she feels at peace.
Now that she’s fully inside her mind, it’s like every thought she’s ever had is a piece of paper littering her brain. She grabs a broom and starts to sweep up all the clutter. The useless slop she’s hoarded from social media and clickbait news sites go straight in the trash. She tucks away the little annoyances and inconveniences of her life in a box at the back of her brain, then she stacks all the things that are out of her control neatly in the closet. Finally, she pulls her hopes and aspirations from the debris, smooths out the crumpled surfaces, and pins them to the corkboard above her desk. Everything is in focus now.
With her headspace clearer than it’s ever been, she decides it’s time to really get organized. No more accidents and no more guesswork. She needs to make a plan to keep her life on track. It’s time to stop living by precarity and start living by protocol. She sits down at the big desk at the front of her brain and pulls out a fresh white sheet of paper. In her hands she holds an exquisite plume and she dips it in the inkwell, determined to develop a new mental constitution that perfectly guides her life forever going forward. With a set jaw, she makes her first strokes.
Her hands are shaky at first and it takes her some time to find the words, but before she knows it, the ideas are pouring out of her. Everything is coming together on the page. Her pen scribbles wildly. With every sentence comes a new breakthrough, with every word a new clarity achieved. The ink is rapidly draining from its inkwell. She’s really hit her stride now. She’ll be finished before she knows it. Her hand glides across the paper, her arm dances over the desk. Her whole body is swaying with the symphony of structure that she’s composing. Is this really all it takes? Why didn’t she sit down and write this sooner?
As she’s writing down the rules of life in her mind, a random, inconsequential, crumpled-up memory from her past falls from the junkpile and rolls across her brain to distract her again. She turns her head, and when she turns she knocks over the inkwell. Black ink spills on the page, covering up every glorious word she’s written in glittering calligraphy. In an instant, the paper is soaked. Not one word is legible. She stares in disbelief as the ink drips off the bottom of the sheet, pooling up drop by drop on the floor of her mind. The ink seems to be endless. Before she knows it, her brain is stained black.
She opens her eyes in the bathtub. The steam stopped rolling long ago. The water is calm and cool. Her apartment is quiet and empty. Everything is numb and still and silent and lifeless. She dries herself off and puts on pajamas. She doesn’t remember where she got her nightgown. Where could it have come from?
She rests her head on her pillow and pulls the sheet up to her shoulders, her head filled to the brim with black ink. She tries to fall asleep and can’t, even though she feels tired. The ink drips in her chest until she can’t feel her heartbeat anymore. Now, there’s only a faint thud echoing through the hollows of her abdomen. The ink seeps down to her toes and slowly turns the bedsheets black. A few moments later, her whole world is stained, and the night swallows her up in its infinite dark.
Maybe tomorrow she’ll try to scrub the ink away. But for tonight, she’s just happy that her mind is finally quiet.