Where is my mind?

I don't know where it's gone. I used to have that itch to write all the time. I'd freeze mid-sentence to hunt down a scrap of paper just to jot. Lie in bed buzzing and finally throw the covers off in a huff to write down ideas. Sit in front of my computer for hours chain-smoking cigarettes in my little off-campus studio apartment. Leave Trainspotting on repeat in the background as a reminder of how far removed from "completely fucked" I still was. It was comforting. It felt like my mind was this neverending geyser of thought, ideas, word pairings that would continue to spew ridiculous-isms to the point that I'd never fully rest. I'd forever be an insomniac slurping cup after cup of black coffee. A full bladder sending my legs into spasms and leaving me wriggling in my seat because I refused to break my chain of thought or I was lazy or both.

But it's gone on vacation somewhere. I lost it in Europe. It might be huddled in the EuroStar tunnel between London and Paris. It might have fallen in love with a one-night stand in Barcelona and left me to pursue a man who was lost before it even learned his name. Or it's begging for change on Grafton Street in Dublin, belting out Irish folk songs at the top of it's lungs.

Maybe I dropped it in a toilet in Rome.

Now everything seems repetitive and somehow wrong. I keep recycling what it one gave me into different versions of itself and I'm so bored.

I'm afraid to look for it. That thing that lived inside me and made my brain want to move all the fucking time. What if I look and it's permanently gone? If I accept that it's just taken a break, I'll never have to face the possibility that it's dead. If I convince myself it'll be back, there's no chance of my finding it's decaying carcass somewhere in the recesses of my completely and utterly fucked head. Maybe my constant depression has ceased to nurture it and finally smothered it into a grey semblance of something it once was.

When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire.

Which is what I'm doing now. Hence the two sloppy, ill-formed posts today.

I'm ripping my hair out and setting myself on fire in the hopes that the stink of burning flesh is enough to guide my sanity back home.

-L