I remember being in the Glenside ward 2021 in June-ish. One of the other inhabitants offered me a cigarette. I accepted. When I smoked it, I stared up at the brilliant starry sky visible through the cookie-cutter shape of the courtyard. I felt connected to everything, but it wasn't the smoke doing that. As I walked, I sensed something more than a cigarettes' effects. A thudding throbbing with every step on the ground, like my weight bounced with every breath. I twirled a bit, a joyous form of self expression I turn to often. I am certain I must have seemed beautiful in this moment. I felt beautiful.
One of those nights, I was alone in the main 'living room' of the ward. Time stretched in all directions. I began to rearrange the furniture, skooching a chair this way and the table that-a-way. While the rest slumbered, I was rearranging the fabric of the universe. Something only maybe some Netflix series will be capable of visually depicting for normies to understand.
In the dead of night, I walked past another room where the TV flickered. It wanted me to turn and face it, to see what horrors it had in store. I didn't face it, but the one time I did, I saw flickering violent imagery of some 'cult' or 'conspiracy'. So figures, the ONE time I see it, it happens to be that? Same happened with the magazines. I couldn't bear to look at their twisted wretched faces, face which spoke to me saying 'just give in, remember you're a single, pathetic ranga (disparaging word for redhead) who doesn't have magical prowess." I saw the Women's Weekly for it's evil. The truth of the matter was that everything unnatural in this world was out to get me. Everything sick. Everything with a vile aura, couldn't handle the pure earth power of the little fairy queen. A great power but still one that has many enemies.
Someone took advantage of me when I was in the ward, although it's not like I was fighting it. They simply took advantage of my scatterbrained nature while I was in this fairy tale. I tried to tell them afterwards, when they hit on me further, that that 'wasn't me'. In reality it was me, I just wasn't interested in developing it further.
Exactly also what the psychiatrist said during my stay at the ward. 'She is autistic so it is understandable how she lost herself in a fairy tale.' and 'The manga creator meant a lot to her because his work helped her through losing her mum'. One is true and another is a lie.
The ward was a safe reprieve for a short time, before things got weirder. After I was released, I was still feeling this oppressive aura, specifically from my own father. Something insistently kept telling me 'get out of the house'. I'm unaware of whether I have blogged about this already, I probably have, but it doesn't hurt to say again.
A mere day or so after being released I went to tea tree plaza, with the promise I would come back home mind you. Something hit me when I played DDR at the machine at the TunzaFun arcade. A white noise washed over my brain, a hot white fuzzy mass making me incapable of any thought. Thus, from then on, I embarked on another rainy day trudging fantasy that spanned 48 hours at least. I have blogged about that before, I wish I could gather my thoughts and post it all in one magnum opus but that, I cannot do.
People think I'm insane. They don't understand the power of what I've experienced. That it isn't simply me making up sensations, but real tangible feelings I've felt sear my flesh. Because the nature of magic is it doesn't wish to be discovered.
It doesn't want to be seen as anything else, but the glittering spectral mysteries of a woman, and the howling strength in a man. I don't know what I'm even getting out by saying this, but it's a power that has made me seen apparitions. In the clouds, brilliant expansive sculpted forms. Real. Oh my thoughts are so disconnected, just like that stupid animation I did a while back.
When I finally returned home (I had turned myself in to the Hindley Street police station and my poor dad picked me up) the fantasy did not end there. I ate nothing but our tree's mandarins and lost heaps of weight (I was already skinny, now I was a twig). I remember waking up at 4am (I hadn't been sleeping much anyways) and turning to this old empty scrapbook my dad had given me. I gave it life. With every scrapping and snipping, I wove a tapestry of my life. Photos of family memories, collages of Lost Children Arc, handouts of mental health helpings. All impossibly meaningful, but worthless garbage to anyone but me.
On that page, in the top left, there is a love heart drawn around a hole I stabbed. I retold my story of first "love" through this page, and experienced things beyond my own mind. How could I have accessed them? They weren't my feelings, but I felt them twist into me as if the very scissors I wielded had turned against me.
I had re-stitched back together a torn handmade skirt. I stitched it perfectly timed to music and felt my past youth. What this represented? A broken hymen and the concealed vulnerability of a scared boy. Scared because it awakened something in him. Yeah, deep. Such was the extraneous wisdom that flowed through me, beyond words and explanations, blurred feelings neither negative or positive. Just feelings.
I plead to access these feelings again every day, but the spirit doesn't give it out easily. It chooses when to affect me. It tends to 'destroy' my life as in, interrupt my studies two times. First it messed up my Adelaide Uni final exams, and the second time it disrupted TAFE.
But I'd rather feel.
I'd rather feel the vivid agony of a broken skirt speaking through me, to take the discouraging words and weird looks from people who consider themselves close. Because they haven't felt it, they haven't seen the way the world bends and shapeshifts.
I may not be able to recount it in chronological order very well, but I am alive and carry the story within me. Although I enjoyed that cigarette in the ward, I knew they didn't feel what I was feeling. A world caressing me. Not a God delusion, but being a participant in a undying cosmic game played by giggling gods.
But they don't want to feel it, it's fine. They simply know Netflix, Steam games and smoking weed.
