Translated by Hinh
At four in the morning, I was walking the streets near Zhongguancun. Life seemed to be returning to the rails, only to explain its cruelty again almost immediately. Life has probing feelers, and I have many bottles of benzodiazepines.
Of course, I am not implying any overtly dangerous act, nor would I recommend one. I usually take the lowest dose only when needed, though there are surprisingly few moments when I feel I truly need it. Whether I run into violence or one of life’s collapses, I tend to enter a kind of combat mode, as if wrestling with the heavens were somehow still a pleasure.
Some things wound more deeply than one imagines.
For example, inside this two-square-meter lofted dorm setup, my habits have gradually begun to slide back into older patterns. In an earlier post, I mentioned that there was a stretch of time when caffeine, medication, alcohol, and then more medication formed a barely harmonious orchestra that kept me functioning. But these past two days, I have found myself wondering what human function really is.
When you fall into extreme pain, everything seems to turn dull, dazed, and blank. I do not know what I am supposed to do next. I walk the streets while a close friend’s voice comes through the phone. They are trying to relay a baseball game to me play by play. The sky shifts from gray-white toward morning. I try to follow that voice forward, pick a destination on the map, and somehow end up circling back to the same place.
What gets me back to where I am staying is nothing more than a sudden flare of rational choice.
In moments like this, my sense of self is total disorder. I cannot sort out the clear voices inside my own body. Once again, a terrible experience does not bring immediate paralysis; real pain always arrives only after safety. If an instinct for survival gives in to panic, life is lost. Death is possible. Threat is everywhere. I wake with my whole body still taut, and my back teeth aching from how hard I have been clenching them.
The medication seems to have stopped working.
Sometimes the thought of death hovers lightly in my mind, circling. A rubber duck turns with the water in a bathtub - that is what death is like. To me, death is the rubber duck in the bath. I have used a bathtub only a handful of times in my life, but I like collecting rubber ducks. Every cup of Linlee lemon tea comes with a small rubber duck; in my life, every fragment of a task I manage to complete seems to come with its own small piece of death.
Death accumulates. It questions useless things, tests the edges of morality, and shouts no at trauma, yet it never feels like evasion. Perhaps you would say death is an escape, but it is not. It is a sacred fighter, bringing the arrival of Judgment Day, because when my eyes close forever, this world too will vanish with my heart and become nothing.
Sometimes I lose the ability to feel. Sometimes my feelings are far too strong and too extreme.
Maybe I am simply getting old. I look at what is on the desk. Everyone tells me that I should ground myself. On the desk are my pills, old medications left over from earlier prescriptions, vitamin D3 supplements, a fountain pen I like, and a messy vase holding nothing at all. And then suddenly… I have nothing left that can be said. My thoughts, and my soul with them, turn dry and deflated.
Why am I writing today? Because I saw an article about psychotherapy saying that if self-harm is a way of expressing pain, then artistic creation can serve as a substitute form of therapy. I want desperately to possess a strong intention toward that kind of substitution.
I have been sitting here - completely, utterly - for a very long time.
Starving? No, no… I do not feel very much. Me and my body. Me and myself. Me and sound. Me and the disorder around me. Me and my tangled hair, and more, more medication.
Yesterday, I had to take some benzodiazepines.
Today, I feel as if nothing is different even without them.
This is a piece of nonsense.