isnotready

[isnotready]

Raincoat

I was 3 years old when my mom got me my first raincoat. It was the tiniest, stiffest, yellowest thing ever. I never got to wear it. We always stayed in when it got rainy. I suppose we had it “just in case”. I guess my mom was and still is overprotective and overbearing. She was always planning ahead of anything and everything. But, for some reason, rain has been a particularly sensitive “hazard”.

It goes without saying that I have always wondered what it’s like to stand in the rain, but never got the chance to feel it on my skin. Even on less rainy days, my mother would keep us in. She said it was out of “principle", staying out of harm's way above all. A ridiculous idea if you ask me, but it did keep us out of the rain for as long as we were clueless children. I was never given a proper reason that this “principle” mattered, but I remember always knowing that it had something to do with my grandfather who had passed away. We’ve skipped gatherings, appointments, tests, and occasions. We’ve unexpectedly stayed at people’s houses just in fear of the rain, as though we were made of sugar.

At the age of 15, I could hear a storm brewing from the safety of my room, and decided to get up. I grabbed my raincoat from my closet where it would’ve waited years on end till I grew out of it and we let it go, giving it to someone who would actually use it. Slowly I made my way to the front door. And, with the utmost care, I turned the doorknob intending to walk out. I looked over my shoulder one last time and decided there was nothing to worry about.

I’ve always wanted to open my arms to the sky, to the clouds, as though I were the main character in a movie; a scene of true liberation. So I stepped through the door and onto the porch with that image in mind. Drops were falling on my raincoat now, but I wasn’t in the rain yet as the shade blocked most of it. Just a couple of steps till I truly made it there.

Sometimes you spend so much time yearning for something, that when you finally do it, it doesn’t feel good enough. I could hear the water hit every inch of the raincoat. I could feel my hands soaking wet as though I was standing underneath the showerhead. But that isn’t what I wanted. So I undo the first button on my coat. *Mom would kill me*. I undo the second. *There’s no way I get out of this without getting sick.* The third. *But oh, the cold water against my face, and hands.* I undo them all, down to the very last one.

Chills start going down my spine, as I throw it to the ground and open my chest to the heavens. “GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT,” were the first words to ever erupt out of my mouth since I’d been born. I wasn’t gonna hide anymore. I wanted life with everything it could throw at me. I wanted this. No hiding indoors. And no raincoat. Though, if I needed one I knew where to find it. A huge gust of air came out of my mouth as I’d been holding my mouth for a minute and hadn’t noticed. And it was followed by panting. The cold rain did that to people, as I’d later learn.

It took me 5 minutes to put the raincoat back on, and I sat on the porch anyway. An hour later the clouds would grant the sun permission to bestow its light upon the Earth and I would find myself smiling, ready for a battle with the world, let alone a fight with my mom.

[isnotready]

A Harrowing Fantasy

Whenever I looked in the mirror I could feel things moving in my chest; less like the flapping of butterflies and more like the slow turning of the earth’s mantle. I could almost spit at the mirror, but it carried no sins, all it did was show me a terribly familiar, and terribly unwelcome face.

Long ago, I would face it and cry for hours on end. Pain, pity and anger would drive me to sob in front of it for hours on end. After I was done, I would head for my room where I had something better than a mirror: pictures of me. I could hurt those and no one would notice. I could ruin them, crumble them, shred them, and no one would know. And so I did.

Gradually the pity faded and, before I knew it, it was completely gone. By then, I’d started searching beyond the that hid behind the mirror, looking for anything beyond the despicable features of the face it projects, but there was nothing to be found

I hoped those eyes would stop being a window for me into the world, as I often pointed them at the sun in an attempt to damage them. But I couldn’t hold out for long. There was always this instinct to look away. In the same way that holding a blade to your arms and cutting into your skin requires- I’m not sure what it requires. I’d say guts, but that doesn’t sound right. I’d say motive, but I wouldn’t know if those who could do it had more motive than I do. This lack of **insert trait here** made me rage. I wished to live without limbs. To live in torment. I *deserved* that, did I not?

I returned to the mirror again and again, feeling the heavy, molten rocks in my rising in temperature, nearing a boil but not quite yet. *There is so much I would do to you, but I simply do not have it in me.*

That was typically where a solution would come up. But it never did. All I did was bear a heavy heart for as long as I could remember. I fantasized about pain that I could never inflict upon myself because I was — for the lack of a better word — a coward. What if I could inject pain into my blood, wait a little, and have it all come to me. Pain-causing chemicals flowing through my blood, making their way to my brain, and once they do I’d be in agony, but never sustain any actual damage.

That sounds right. They should make that. Why haven’t they made that yet?