From the inside looking out

By Sandra Rowe

10/18/01

One day I woke up and
everything was different.
I could not stop the pain.
It broke through my awareness as if
a bomb had detonated inside my self,
my body,
me…
Shrapnel from the explosion shattered,
pierced and
tore away
everything
inside me

The pieces that remained
were disjointed, jagged, sharp, piercing
wounds from
the destruction or my inside.

I did not know what had happened.
I do not know how it happened.
I did not know exactly when it happened.
I just noticed something
awful.

I had felt it from time to time.
I tried to relieve it from time to time.
I was so busy that
I did not give it a name.

But then it became…
the pain.
the pain that would not
go away,
the pain that had
been there
lurking in the darkness. …
pain

I knew that I needed

help.

I used to listen to my body.
I sometimes lay on the floor and
I could feel
the thump of my heart as
it pushed the blood through my veins.
I could hear the heart beating
in my ears,
in my brain.

I could feel the liquid pulsing in
my fingers, toes,
legs,
head,
chest,
thighs,
along the sides of my neck and
down my legs.
I could see the deep red
of the blood
as it gushed and pushed
here and there.

I was still and quiet
at those times and
in tune with
the peace surrounding me while
the life force was moving through
every place in or
near the surface of
me.

Time was not an issue.
Only the moments that
were impossible to catch
because they were gone
in every instance
when I thought that I
could hold them in
captivity to insure the immortality
that I wished for
knowing that the light at
the end of mortality is
immortality.

Rushing, rushing, rushing by…
my life.
The inside changed.
Something else happened
and
I cannot pinpoint the exact day,
time or
year.

Something was happening.
Outside of my body there was
chaos…
rushing, rushing
chaos.

I lost touch with the inside.
I thought that I was in touch but
somewhere along the
time line,
my head was severed from
my shoulders.

I carried my head lovingly
in my arms turning
it this way and that.
I thought that was in control of
it.

My body was lost with out it.
The inside suffered…
the connections were not being made,
things went awry while
my head in my arms kept calling to me…
the inside.
Damage, damage, damage everywhere…

I lifted my head to my shoulders and
replaced it
where I thought it should be.

Af first I was familiar with it
on my shoulders
connected to the shattered
insides.

I realized that the head that
I thought was mine, was gone and
what replaced it,
although it looked like me,
had nothing to do with the me
that I used to know. …

When my head and neck were severed
from my body,
so was my soul and spirit
they floated, lost
in a place of
nothingness

Nothing that I seemed to do was right
from the inside of
a now unfamiliar place.
This place and that place stuttered
inside my body
while I tried to
stop it…

Every thing on the inside of my body
felt out of place,
not right,
heavy and
foreboding.

I thought that I knew what was wrong.

Chaos ,
chaos,
chaos…
time went by…

I could not reach
that place of listening to
the blood thumping through my body.
It was there but
ever so
elusive…..

I struggled, cried out and tried
to numb my self and
my body …
against the chaos…
I did not know or
Understand

Sharp here, dull there,
sore here, knife sharp pain there,
in the distance,
sometimes close, sometimes far away
time,

time,

time.

A rumbling started ..
the sharps became sharper,
the sore became sorer.,
the throb became so loud
that it I could hear
anything else.
Everything
hurt.

The pain was
invasive,
surrounding
numbing,
deafening and
intense.

My head could not fathom what had happened.
My cry for help went unheard…
they thought I was
depressed,
a hypodhondraiac,
sick
from something else,
here and there,

And they
would not listen..
to my puzzle,
they could not help me
put the pieces back..
to stop the dive
into darkness….

i was alone with my insides
crying for help..
and
there was nothing out there
that could save me,…
so I thought

He gave it a name…..
he said that life was ending
as I knew it and
it would be changed,
forever.

I did not believe that
I denied it and
then I became
overwhelmed
by it.

Other people claimed to have it
but they looked OK.
I looked
Ok,
as if nothing had
changed.

I screamed from my head
to my insides,
why did this happen to you…
.there was no answer,
I screamed at the great spirits
surrounding me,
why did this happen?
There was no answer.
I stopped screaming.

I felt dead on the inside.
My insides were separated
from my head…still

A drop of white,
another drop of white,
light…
it got brighter…

I was numbed by it,
but the pain…
.it was still there.

The chaos outside began again
And
I stopped it…
I wanted to hear the blood gushing
through my body,
my head,
my fingers,
my toes.

Finding that place
would be
a true quest
to find the stillness
that rests inside…
away from the
chaos.