When I think about my girlfriend I first think about her heart; that sinewy mass of tissue beating inside her chest like a tiny engine. Then there are her eyes. They aren’t luminous orbs, they are just eyes. They see me and they see the world just like eyes should. There is her smile that shows off her admittedly long teeth and seemingly sharper than average canines. She laughs very sweetly and she speaks in partly broken sentences, just like how I imagine her thoughts play out in her head. Then there are all the yellow lines. She has static in front of her face, just like everyone else. Hers is yellow, though, so I can always see through it. Other people have variations of greys and blacks obscuring them. It’s less that I can actually see it but more that I feel it. I can feel this messy cloud in my head that covers their face in my mind when I look at them. I can still make out the faces, but looking at them makes me uncomfortable. It can be hard to concentrate when you can hear someone’s face. They get angry and the static moves with their voices. They scream and it spikes. Crying sounds hollow and makes it look flatter. My girlfriend’s static does that as well, but I can handle it. It’s a sort of sharp, acidic yellow that accompanies the word “schizophrenia”. She doesn’t have the diagnosis, I do. I don’t know why hers is yellow, though, but I like it. When I break down and hear birds crying and flowers whispering, she is there to cradle me in her arms and soothe me. When other people try to, their static feels worse and it scares me. I can’t handle being outside sometimes. So many people. It overloads my head and I get confused and want to cry. The doctors at the hospital had static when they forced me to stay. My boss had static when he fired me for being hospitalized for so long. My family had static when they left me. Everyone else has it. When I look in the mirror, I see my face. No static, just my face. I think of the colour yellow and I can taste it on my tongue when I see my face. I wish people didn’t terrify me. I wish I could control my thoughts. I wish I could clean my apartment and feel motivated again. I wish life felt like life. But they do, I can’t, and it doesn’t. My world is a black and white mess of radio static faces and then the people behind them. I don’t know how to handle myself. Is this a regular experience for people with my diagnosis?
Youre a great writer. I enjoyed reading you.
I sort of understand your feeling. For me, peoples eyes would become dead and lifeless, if they were “the other”, so to speak. By “the other” i mean people who have no souls, thinking or emotions basically. They are not like me. They are actors, only there to make life seem as if its not a staged play. But when looking in their eyes you realize it is all theatre and the psychosis has a firm grip on your reality. As if there is nobody on this world except for me and everything only seems to be random, but actually its all pretending.
Things havent changed yet. Although i dont hear voices anymore, i still have the psychosis in my memory and thinking.
It can be difficult to believe everyone else has their own lives and thoughts and emotions at times. When people are so callous towards others or don’t acknowledge the little things that go on around them, it seems like they don’t actually exist. You look at them and it can hurt when you realise there is nothing behind their eyes. They feel like trees or rocks; just sort of there.