it hurts to think. 1

And as I stretch out in my bed, opening my arms and legs –as if making a snow angel, kneading and stretching, wrinkling the sheet– I begin to think. The day is cold, and that freezes my brain, making it hard to have coherent thoughts. Speaking in these temperatures feels like pure torture. I think and think. I think about thinking, and in doing so, I can't find anything that makes sense. It feels like when someone reminds you to breathe, and something as simple as breathing –which we do automatically– becomes manual, and you feel like you're running out of air.

I'm not sad, but I'm not happy either. I remember my childhood, and now my mouth has a bittersweet taste of overwhelming nostalgia. My eyelids feel heavy, but I fight to stay awake. I fight against myself. An internal struggle between the sleep hormones, muscle relaxation, and me. Although it’s my body, not my soul, that’s winning. My hands –numb from drowsiness– cling to the sheet, and I let out a long sigh, turning my head to one side to look at the open window.

The curtains, white and slightly transparent, sway in the wind of the dark, long winter night. It gives me peace. Or at least it’s something that doesn't cause me any discomfort, just an emptiness in my chest and stomach, making my desire to lose myself in my mind for eight fast hours even stronger.

Living so much in your head makes it hard to differentiate between a mere dream and reality. A reality that everyone enjoys but you, and that is strangely overwhelming in every way. And it's that, the rejection of the real, that causes me an almost constant sense of dehumanization and depersonalization throughout most of my day. I rub my eyes, opening them with the tips of my trembling fingers, pulling them downward, forming a grimace straight out of an American horror movie.

Could my life be some kind of tragicomedy? Are there cameras all over my house watching everything I do and don’t do? Canned laughter at every little thing I do? Are they watching me right now, while I’m thinking all of this? I think and think, but I never stop thinking. Stopping is impossible in every sense you can think of (pun intended). My mind starts to blur, as if parts of my life had never been real, and I have incoherent thoughts. Though incoherence is the least of my worries, and what has least concerned or mattered to me for decades.

Nothing in this world makes sense. It’s obvious that everything has a purpose and a –scientific– explanation. We are a set of experiences, thoughts, morals, and tastes, although, on the other hand, we’re just a mass of veins, organs, bones, and skin living alongside other similar things on an oval sphere that spins in a galaxy within a universe full of life we will never know –or at least I won’t. I keep thinking. Thinking calms me, it reassures me that I still have a shred of control over my life. I can think and think about whatever I want because no one can control my thoughts, except for mind control, but that’s another topic altogether, and honestly, it's too vast to get into right now.