20sickragdollthoughtstream.pdf

The thing about being twenty and sick and rag doll is you are pulling the twine out of your ears—the one that has been protruding from you for the past few days. You cannot hear the small hum of the cicadas or your mother’s soft lullabies beside your bed. It’s not that it’s deafening, these things just aren’t there the way they were when you were pulling the fluff from the ears of the inherited rag doll. Her soft and innocent body is freckled with fragments of your piss left behind which leeched onto her like pins and needles steal the epidermis from your grandmother's steady seamstress hands. And because this twine soaked up your brain, you feel yourself losing the humid summer childhood bedroom—a wax and hollow skull for the morning dappled with the flicker of the light polluted stars. Which is probably because these things aren’t really there either.

The senses left are the smell of the sterile metal poles surrounding you and the unsightly blueness of the paper gown’s draping figure. 

You tell the doctors, “Something bad happened.” Which is short of an answer. 

“If something bad happened, it’s best to come here immediately so we can run tests.”

“I was bathing.” The only piece of your brain left behind is the beetle’s elytra.

“That’s the worst you can do.”  

And the undulating of hospital curtains are blinding from the doctors and doctors’ doctors who have cycled in and out in search of doctors’ doctors’ doctors to provide an answer for the big god disease that grew the twine in your body. 

“She must have shoved that inside of herself!” a nurse cried a few nights ago. You chalk it up to a fire in his hair. 

A therapist is concerned that you can’t recognize a picture of your five-year-old self, because that’s not fair to the little girl flashed before your eyes or all of the faces you have forgotten in the last decade and a half. Circles and circles of itchy twine are soothing and rotting the insides, which probably look like ink blobs on a personality test. This is to say you are made up of everything surrounding you and somehow that’s philosophical and corny at the same time. 

Five and apneic and rag doll, you were dreaming on the eighth ring of Saturn and flattened rag dolls weren’t so obscure and no one smiled that smile of absurdity that they do when someone’s eyes shift differently or twine like dicks are sticking out of you. Twenty and sick and rag doll, you’re apologizing to your mother for the hospital bill and letting the twine dangle long and weightless from your soft lobes. You’re apologizing for yanking the stuffing from grandmother’s rag doll and sweating your piss into the poor girl as you ran away to the eighth ring of Saturn.