I'll Keep my Eyes Fixed on the Sun
Elliot Mulder
The volatile storm still hounds on, and the fire it struck down in me remains as my words and actions lay waste to the friends I form. But it isn’t everywhere.
The volatile storm still hounds on, and the fire it struck down in me remains as my words and actions lay waste to the friends I form. But it isn’t everywhere.
The embroidered twilight hangs off the wall. My eyes and arms and waist and legs knot into its threads. As I close my gaze, all that weaves through my mind is this. The world spins beyond that cold, hard light staring down at me from on high. The sturdy floor beneath my shoes begins to rustle and bump. My vignetted gaze is held only by that which I dream of. I’m a faraway kid cross-legged on the carpet before a static TV; its cavernous, screaming white noise swallows me whole. I am far flung from my urban enclosure now.
I can feel it all. The cold air rests on me like a butterfly on a leaf. The waving breeze soothing to my solitary skin. Every string of hair I have flutters as it absorbs me into its grasp. Its crisp touch hits my tired muscles like a cymbal crashing with sticks; it is overwhelming. It is keen. It is perfect. It is embracing.
I bear eyes on the vast galaxy blanketing us, the stars that bloom into existence only to be veiled. They dazzle, and there are so many threading it all together. The moon bestows its subtle luminescence onto the land on which I reside. It holds the horizon tight, two lifelong lovers who would be hollow without one another. It is infinitely beautiful. If only my eyes opened wider, my mind looked deeper, for their innocent allure deserves it. No more scouring through industrial foisting. Here, that artificial glow is a thing of nightmares. The raw and boundless universe inhabits my eyes.
The free-flowing grass and bulrush dance together in the swift wind it bows for. As my hands reach out softly, they meet my fingertips with a kiss. Beyond my touch, it all sways, a mighty ocean in its own right. Petals swim through the air and off to the stoic eucalypt trees, standing over the fields running to the skyline. Their minty aroma fills my lungs.
The wild rustles collide with one another, becoming an orchestra unlike anything. The white noise is now a symphony sovereign over me. It whispers and mumbles and screams and shouts in my ears. It holds me there for the moment so I can no longer get pulled away.
My heart falls to a slow beat. My breathing so deep and filling that I could almost drift asleep.
I am unbound. I have escaped. I have reached my dreams and abandoned the world, finally.
Such decompression always seemed a mountainous feat inside my sky-blue madhouse. I’d been born within four tilting, shrinking, suffocating walls, and the room was already small enough. Beyond my door, marked with torn stickers and worn paint, with a lightning crack struck through its back by a slam, the certainties of my days would be eye-rolls, the simple clicks of a tongue and the ever-present storm thrashing against the hinges. Isn’t it strange how something so little translates so much?
That disdainful ‘yes?’ of hers, the scornful grin that so many shot at me six hours a day, the intrinsic irritation in every exchange I shared with my cousin, who was my first friend. The thunder was booming; it was begging me to open that door. So, it stayed shut. At least then, I knew I could breathe easier.
My mind soon came to hook on the 30-minute fables playing on the TV. I reverently watched all the iconic friendships in action daily at six. I witnessed relentless compassion, an unwavering willingness to have one another’s backs and loving bonds stronger than gravity. They welded into my mind and I became irrevocably infatuated as it played out on the screen, a muse for my longing.
Meanwhile, my dry, drab carpet became my playground, teeming with action figures, Legos and books. I religiously sat there as my mind swam through the sky, and they were the most welcome adventures. I helped the good guys battle the bad. I set the paper alight with my pencils and pens. I wandered through the wardrobe and discovered all the infinite and wonderful worlds waiting on the other side. They took me everywhere, and I took them everywhere as well. The sun and all the stars had come to life in my mind and heart. My smile had never felt that real. You could find me lost in there for hours;
For days,
For weeks,
For months,
For years.
As those walls began to crack and their shade of blue darkened in the sunlight, that smile of mine faded. My widened eyes drooped and my voice grew quiet. The paint on those toys had worn, but I was still monotonously running to them though there was no more road; steadily, my mind turned off to it. I walked home each day from that elementary purgatory. Fresh new, baneful words, an irked stare, or the lack of someone I planned my whole day for would sear into my mind. All that way back, branded with their collective contempt.
These would take root until I was trapped alone with those memories and the endless quiet of that room—a quiet so immense and chronic dwelling in the air, stalking me, forcing me into the worst corners of myself.
My eyes locked onto the pavement of school grounds and footpaths and got snug in that avoidant view. To turn my eyes to those around me seemed to invite me to their sneers, to scream at myself that I was wrong to try. Stillness became foreign as my legs began to quake in trepidatious classrooms. My body autonomously rocked back and forth while my parents demanded I repress it. Every inhale and exhale turned hollow and stressed as the heavy press of anxiety’s hand conquered my chest. My mind began to billow with questions and notions about myself that I could barely make sense of. I incessantly scrambled to understand what I did and how I should change. Critical convictions as I looked in the mirror moulded into a reflex. From the chagrin, the sneers, the words and the hatred, I evolved into an amalgamation of every upset moment that swelled in my mind while the rest of those times spilt out and faded from me. I had become a weed in need of digging out. Infected at the stem, and its unnerving symptoms were now my nature.
As I traded one school uniform for another, it festered in my chest: A spark, catching fire. And I, naive and at its mercy, fell into it. It crept into the space between every mumble, disassociation and lonely breath. This feeling preys like a snake in tall grass. A black widow spider in the corner of the room. A vulture waiting in the wings. It is a flame that sets my chest on fire, makes my heart scorch with stress and melt with melancholy. It burns through my mind and ultimately leaves, in its wake, disdain, frustration and confusion. It is the embers that can never die out. It is the only infinite light that is clear to my gaze. It is the spark that has dreadfully led me here. It is what waits at the end of a long day when all the other lights have gone out.
That flame would flicker when I started to thrash my drums. I sank into that stool in my nana’s decrepit shed, littered with leaves, spider webs and gardening tools. The walls were grey and battered, almost apocalyptic. I’d twirl my sticks through my fingers and an unstoppable smile widened on my face again.
My swirling chest still circled those same painful derisions, but every little flare boomed and unleashed on that snare. Through all the hours I sat there, the sweat I would drown in, the bloody callouses I’d built, I had found a new rhythm to follow.
The power and passion in their vehement melodies possessed my bones and unchained me from my anxiety. Each breath was deeper; each thought came clearer. I never knew being alive like I did in that shed. I’d never cared so little who heard my vivacity. It was my first little pocket where others’ grip on me became negligible. In time, the cymbals cracked at my lashes while rust shrouded the rims. My sticks would splinter in my palm. I would hit the drums harder as that wretched storm only continued to bloat.
The echoes of those days became more transparent as my self-awareness materialised. Now, my youngest years are only known to me through a vile mirage while all else flushed away instantaneously. It fogs my mind and never looks to part.
With my new uniform came new scenery and new faces steeped into my everyday life. I was on the outside looking inward. Now, it could be different. The doors opened further with the click of a mouse and headphones on my ears; the world of online games unfolded to me. With it, I slammed the reset button. Under the eyes of those foreseeably judgmental new crowds I would tread lightly, for the ground I walked seemed sown with landmines. All of the hostile hindrances I knew were stitched into my DNA; for some time, to decimate myself for these strangers was the only discernable answer. In their shade, I chose to strip away my great passions and unrelenting eagerness and stayed vigilant of my eruptive emotionality, my most unyielding symptom. I wasn’t less and I wasn’t more; I was just different. I had to be different.
In all the idle hours, I was locked to my desk chair as the vibrant glow of my laptop enthralled me. I was so love-struck by the creative endeavours I discovered on that screen, like a moth to the sun. I escaped deeper into freshly weird worlds as they grafted my dearest values and elated my stirring soul with every beat of their stories. My breath knew how to steady and I could see an infinity in these worlds. Here, I was made from something other than spite.
In the deepest of such fiction, I learnt the complexity of connection, the power of compassion and the serenity in the serene. I found the voice I wanted to harness and the eyes I wanted to see through. My emotions found conduct like electricity at the touch of two hands. They drove me as I hiked into the storm beyond.
I was adrift among the masses that filled those stifling, cramped corridors. Chasing even superficial connections around any corner, with those I could muster the courage to speak at. I sought to build myself up from a foundation of ambiguous goodwill and earn smiles and laughter in each exchange. Manifest comfort in a state I awaited the singe of.
Online, I grounded myself in the company of a few fierce personalities. We all buried ourselves in the games we cherished playing together and did so with ease. Countlessly committed evenings, deep into the dusk, we’d come to know each other in the most deep-seated ways with no impeding or apprehension, only vulnerability and keenness.
But as these friendships maintained, their tunes began to change. A coldness would dwell in the gaze of those I sat next to. Endless conversations turned into my enthusiasm facing their scarce words, imbued with indifference and passive-aggression. A palpable urgency and restlessness plagued people as I spoke to them, sparking that part of my already hypertense mind I wanted to keep dormant. Perhaps the woods I traversed were thicker than I knew and I’d burnt the bridges down with my eyes shut.
The flame in my chest nagged at me with distressing questions, smoking out all else in my mind. My instincts led me to seek people’s transparency; the solution to hints of a familiar disdain became a swift apology. Things couldn’t be fine or easy. There had to be something I’d done. There always was.
When my muscles lost tension, my mind learned to rest and my guard finally settled, it led me to be proven right. When my anxiety was high, my words saw me be genuine, my guard became steel and I was still proven right. When these rhythms became law, a canon to my social life, I knew, one day, that they would be right. Around people, I’ll keep stepping on live mines that will go kaboom. My hindrances merely evolve, and they show no signs of stopping.
The volatile storm still hounds on, and the fire it struck down in me remains as my words and actions lay waste to the friends I form. But it isn’t everywhere.
Past the schools, houses, parks and people flows a still river where I wander, where the grass flows freely under towering trees. The sky glimmers pink and gold as I bask in that brisk evening breeze embracing my skin. The leaves rustle together like rain pattering on the ceiling. The river trickles until it drowns my ears. They breathe life into a harmonic serenity only found when all else is silent. They instill a little life into me.
It is something beyond the laws of my world that makes my heart slow as my mind runs together with the river that draws clarity and bliss. Flee from this world of panic and hyper-fixations. It is the thrash of a snare drum, the escape of a story. It is a field where the stars are endless beyond the wind that flows invincible, a place to roam free and escape myself.
Here—my flame, after all this time—goes out. Finally.
All it takes is a little distance.