Stockholm Syndrome
Sometimes you have good days. Everything fits inside the zipper, nothing spills out over the top and stains your white clothing. You feel pretty and girly and all the things you’re supposed to feel to be happy, and you are happy. And then some days out of nowhere, like an ant bite to the ankle, the veil is ripped away from you and nothing feels right. All the sedatives that usually keep you complacent wear off and suddenly you don’t know where you are or what’s going on or how you got there, and you don’t know where to or what from but you feel an urge to escape. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing; this implosive feeling is impartial to parties or school or work. It will hit you whether you are moving at 0 or 100. No matter where you are in life it will find you like death and it will stop you in your tracks and wreck you. And it will make you wonder if for the last year you’ve blurred the lines between ‘playing dress up for fun’ and conforming because you want people to think you’re normal and your mother to stop hating you.
It feels like housing two people in one brain. Jekyll and Hyde. A parasite has invaded and masquerades as the host. The host stays drugged and chained up in the attic, but sometimes the parasite forgets to give him the next dose of sedative and he wakes up and takes over and now all of a sudden the body can’t stop crying and it doesn’t know why. And this makes the parasite fight harder to blend in.
You find yourself in a man you don’t particularly care for’s bed because everything else you normally use to quiet the feeling hasn’t worked. And it’s no surprise that this man isn’t a good enough distraction either. The moment you get in his bed you can’t stop the tears and you try to explain it to him.
“Do you ever feel like you have Stockholm Syndrome in your own mind?”
“Yeah. I was the king of high school and my frat, and now look at me, I’m the manager of a kitchen.” And he talks for five minutes about how you just have to keep grinding and fuck the haters and you’ll find your happiness.
“No. It’s not like that.” You know he will never understand the feeling you are trying to explain to him, but you still want to try. If you were in peril in a foreign country, you’d still run to someone who doesn’t speak your language, hoping they’d at least understand ‘Help.’ “Some days I wake up and I feel like I’m nothing more than an exoskeleton.”
“I feel you. I used to be a professional snowboarder…”
You scoff and he gets mad and says, “Look, I can offer you my advice, which you clearly don’t want, or my dick. Would that make you feel better?”
You give up on the idea of him ever being able to understand what‘s wrong, and you won’t waste your cries on deaf ears, and his advice is only putting you in a worse mood, so you give him an answer just to change the topic because it’s embarrassing to be sitting here in a grown man’s bed crying about your stupid fucking problems and you just want him to fall asleep. Afterwards when he pulls away your mind goes straight back to it and you start bawling again, but this time you excuse yourself to the bathroom until you’ve calmed down enough to feel like a real person again. But it rattles you, the quick and fervent feeling that your whole life has been make-believe while everyone else is real around you.
You know your options. You can kill the parasite and give the host his body back and be the freak of the family and get weird looks everywhere you go. Or you can keep holding him hostage in his own body and be normal and popular and loveable. Other people have killed their parasites and they are evidence that despite the sacrifices, killing the parasite is the best option. But you have never been as strong or as brave as other people, no matter how much you like to pretend that you are. Maybe in a few years. There is still time despite all the time lost that you can never get back. And when you’ve already lost so much you question if it’s even worth the rest of your time.
You keep telling yourself that one day this facade will start to feel like your real skin and you will be happy. One day. One day. You keep telling yourself that it will come soon. But in the meantime you keep a man trapped in the attic and fight to contain him when he wakes up crying, asking what’s going on and who he is.
