Memoirs of the Mostly Sane

Suspension is the moment you're hovering just over the precipice, your eyes squeezed shut and the sun burning red into the black of your eyelids. No, no, no, that's not right. What is the point of feeling if you cannot hear?

Suspension is the sporadic pounding of your heart, rising above the cacophony of the world screaming around you.

I was there once. Really, I was. I was a perfect little child with perfectly blonde hair always in naturally perfect doll curls. People would see my smile and tell my parents, "She is going to be a beautiful woman when she grows up." They didn't expect my hair to dishevel or my teeth to chip or my lips to crack. Too many nights sitting outside listening to the owls talk nonsense to each other, I guess.

"How are you shining so disobediently to by-and-by?"

"Oh, quite, oh, just a sprinkle of stars on my catastrophic- oh- nest."

"Fly higher, friend, haha, keep flying."

Listening to them can give you quite a headache. It's harder to listen to the wolves, though, who spend the nights wailing such mournful songs of love to the moon that you feel your heart being torn out of your chest. They do not understand why the moon is untouchable. Neither do I, really. I climbed a tree once to try and catch the moon. It was the highest tree I could find, sitting solace in the corner of the park.

"Why do you listen to what no one else will?" it asked me.

Because, I wanted to tell it, listening is the pseudonym for learning. But the moon was smiling so graciously at me that I couldn't respond to the tree, I just wanted to touch the silver glow with my own fingers. I wanted to feel the moon's pulse in the palm of my hand. The tree's bark was rough under my bare feet, and its sturdy existence reassuring. Surely, I thought, surely something that held up the sky so well would hold me up without much effort.

But I didn't even reach the top before I fell.

Oh, it was a lovely fall. For one second the world stopped and all that really seemed to matter was listening to my heart thud agonizingly beautiful lyrics into my veins, while the dim noise of life around me rose to play the harmony for my heart's melody. Then the ground came up and broke my leg. I lay there for several hours, watching the moon laugh at me, before someone found me.

"Why didn't you shout?!" they ask angrily. They don't understand that I was too busy listening to my heart to speak.

But really, I'm quite sane on most days.