Reflections upon a trashed room

I met you, for a brief second. You were on your way out with madness on your brow and sweat all over your skin. Signs of the poison pumping through your veins. Your voice strangled and your body twisting, not able to hold still. Then you were gone. And the flat opened up to me.

It was hard not to immediately react. To let my feelings go wild. To curse, to call you back. The bathroom flooded, the kitchen in a state of wet disrepair. Nothing new. Still infuriating. Finally, I came to your room.

The chaos inside spilled all the way out. Food, trash, dirt - nothing held back by the broken doorframe. The threshold: a taste of what was inside. Not one piece left intact or on its original place. Waste collecting knees high in the corners. The wall: a diary of your mental decline. Holes, greater than your head, in the table.

What finally broke me was your couch. Once a warm brown, now a smeared black. Knife cuts all over it. Only one space was left for you to rest, as small as a child. Scarcely enough space to sleep for a few, furtive moments, rolled into yourself like an embryo. Before your demons forced you to wake up, pushing the poison back into your nostrils, trying to banish them.

What happened to you? Why are you hurting so much? How are you still alive?

What terrible power inside of you keeps on going, forcing you to endure all of this again and again, pushing you deeper and deeper into your personal hell?

I felt the sting in my heart before the tears in my eyes. For so many months you lived in this space, and as it declined, so did you. If your room is a reflection of your soul, then your soul is fucked.

This agression, this hopelessness, this self-deprivation is what got me. Something tells me that the violence you aimed at your furniture is the violence you would like to aim at yourself. To get the demons out of your head, to finally have some silence behind your eyes. But they are relentless, and like a ever-growing tsunami, they take you with them. And every tsunami will break a shore sooner or later.

Later, a call. The police picked you up, forcefully transferring you to the next mental institution. A moment of bitter relief. For your mind knows so little peace, so little respite. This circle will continue soon. And we, you and me, will be as helpless then as we are right now.