The Tower

The coffee shop was relatively busy once I'd wrestled open the heavy glass door, bustling with construction workers from a nearby site, nursing students and a number of other productive members made up the attendance of coffee seekers. I supposed I fit in enough, college aged on a college campus.Still,  I felt a strange sense of irony strike me at the realization that maybe I should have been amongst them- yet no one would guess I had come from the psychiatric facility across the street. I felt how I did in most places-- there in visage but not truly, like a transient presence in a landscape I didn't quite belong in on a miasmic level, an imposter playing at being alive. A revenant without the romance of purpose. 

"I haven't seen you in forever! Are you working here?" 

I parted from the hug, the black of my leather jacket contrasting almost symbolically with her scrubs. 

"Um...actually, I'm a patient here." 

__________

I was hazy and half there, the overly warm light of the cafeteria filmlike as I blew on one of my shrimp dumplings. The scene was so picturesque that I questioned whether I was what was wrong, my sentiments misplaced. I wished I hadn't outgrown my adolescent notions of romance misinformed by indie movies written by men so that I might've enjoyed this-- I wished I could find comfort in what I had once fantasized of before realizing that there is no joy in being the manic pixie dream girl. He was nervous, fumbling with his chopsticks and it would've been endearing if I hadn't known I was still nothing but a phantasmic projection, a favorable canvas for his fantasy and someone to compliment the shitty music he made.  

"Have you ever used those?" 

He looked up sheepishly. 

"once." 

I huffed in amusement. A beat of silence before he looked at me. 

"You've been through a lot." He said, feebly poking at his rice noodles. 

"When you cried...I felt really bad. I wanted to give you a hug." I looked down at my food, recalling my display of emotion during group. 

"Thanks." I murmured, contemplating his words with a deep seated unease. The words should have been disarming, they were ones I craved. Yet I felt guarded, unmoved. I questioned whether my apprehension was earned, whether the attempts at intimacy felt prodding because they were or whether my faculty for connection was broken. Yet another contradiction allowed by the fractured nature of my being-- a sharp, intuitive and calculated mind tempered by crippling self distrust,  an agonizing need for connection tempered by logical enough of a temperament to be unfulfilled by being idealized and not seen. I supposed it was a good thing that I had the salience to differentiate genuine empathy with emotional objectification, that my pain was being viewed as nothing more than a conduit for him to appropriate, fetishize, find comfort in.  but it didn't assuage the feeling of self denial, that my recognition of illusion still left me with only smoke. More than anything, I resented that I could be laid bare in all my complexity and still be picked at with the uncouth regard of a vulture to carrion. 

_________________________________

"I wish... I dunno... I wish I were like you. Its like... you just have this inner world and...I wanna be like that" 

I knew he had no semblance of me aside from his covetous perception of me as some sort of muse. In a way, I knew why he felt artificial, why he envied and imitated me.  His actions were hollow, He was hollow, searching for me to give him meaning as though I were a figment of his subconscious instead of a deeply scarred person, my vulnerability something to exploit for his own comfort. I knew he would push and push in an attempt to burrow himself within me in a way that made me feel as though I were rotting. 

"You made me realize that suffering can be beautiful. I'm not...I'm not glad you went through that but I'm glad it made you the way you are" 

I didn't disagree with the sentiment. I found myself taking a similarly romantic approach in conceptualizing my suffering, but I felt no joy at being the inspiration for such an epiphany. I felt unrealized without the reprieve of delusion or fantasy. 

_______________________________

"I feel like I need a cigarette." I turned my head in the same direction the wind urged my scarf. He gave me a puzzled look. I laughed drily. 

"I don't smoke. I just feel like it'd be fitting." I looked down at my boots, knocking them together absently. 

"Oh..yeah, I see why you'd say that." 

I chewed on ,my bottom lip as a passerby eyed us where we perched on the concrete bordering the hospital. What a picture I was sure we painted, two people wearing our pain freely, clearly paired wearing black and spikes yet entirely mismatched and unlikely, him a foot taller, lanky and blonde. I found myself deeply troubled as I eyed the asphalt. This felt like something I'd romanticized and seen in films, but I didn't feel the catharsis of kinship. Sitting beside him, I still felt wholly alone. The quiet stretched on as it always did, like he clung to my presence despite me being barely there. I knew I wasn't being seen, I was a pretty dark thing that he didn't fully grasp the depth of, not a person to know but a comforting concept who's pain and complexity existed only to add to my novelty. I could see it in the way he looked at me, and it made me uncomfortable in a way that brought me to silence. It was a cruel irony to be offered the one thing I wanted most, to have the prospect dangled in front of me with a foresight that seemed so Delphic I questioned whether it was self sabotage.

"I could try to understand you." 

 I could discern the falsity in his actions even he was unaware of because of his own preoccupation with the sincerity of his despair. I knew I could never be seen by someone so consumed with the enormity of his own pain that he'd invoke my own to comfort himself. Yet the offer brought me great torment, in the fashion of Byronic tragedy I was cursed with knowledge that exiled me from yet another prospect of reprieve, another reason to stay within the dark tower in my mind, the sin for which I was banished being my ability to differentiate consumption and connection.  I questioned at what point my armor became a prison, my discernment a burden so heavy I sometimes longed for the comfort of ignorance that would allow me to lean into affection without the foreknowledge of disaster, that in my denial of destruction at the hand of another, I am destined to destroy myself. 

Conceptual Framework:

Landscape as Psychological Projection

• Gothic landscapes function as external manifestations of internal psychological fragmentation
  
• Physical environments become metaphorical representations of mental states
  
• Terrain of dislocation, instability, and psychological uncertainty