I WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FUNNY | ✓

▬ 21

AIN'T IT FUN?

              Is it more accurate to describe sleep as time travelling or immunity to its passage entirely? When I spend seven days in bed experiencing only fragments of consciousness, do I pause time or fast forward it?

When I was once asked to describe mania in group, I explained it as a funhouse mirror maze: fun at first, your ego relishes seeing infinite versions of yourself, but in your overconfidence, you walk straight into a mirror and someone laughs. There's no recovering from that bruise. A cycle ensues — each mirror you walk into doubles your annoyance, which in turn builds up recklessness that results in more collisions.

By the time you've crawled out, nose bleeding and head throbbing, you've become so used to a world of reflections that the absence of them is jarring. More significantly, it's boring. Normal reality might as well be a black hole, and before you've even managed to craft an alias for the crimes of your reflections, you become depressed.

I've only been in a funhouse thrice in my life but it really works as an apt metaphor for my existence. Distorting mirrors, sections of floor that rip themselves from under you, and escalators split in half that move in erratic rhythms.

Medication depression, a side effect of the adjustment period, is something else entirely. You've made it through all the rooms — the vortex tunnels of panic attacks, manic mirrors, paranoia of compressed air jets that keep you on edge — and finally the exit shines with green fluorescent lights. But you step through it and find yourself in yet another room. The real door is locked, the key discarded at the bottom of a ball pit, and you can only get rid of the globes by eating them. Your pick: stay here forever or turn yourself into a taxidermy stuffed with hard plastics.

A funhouse curated by Jigsaw.

The knock on my door is soft but I flinch. It cracks open and Baba peers inside, then, seeing I'm awake, slips through to kneel at my bedside. He reaches to pet my forehead, brushing back the baby hairs stuck to sweat. 'Habibi, your friends are downstairs to see you. I can tell them you're sleeping.'

Though I want nothing more than for him to do just that, I push myself up. He has already covered for me five times and it won't get any easier if I keep procrastinating it. So I rub my face with both hands and force sound to leave my vocal cords. 'It's calm.'

Baba asks if I want help standing up and when I shake my head, he leaves. I haven't moved a muscle when his muffled voice rises from the entrance. 'He'll be down in just a moment.'

I'm not. The ache in my muscles from lying in bed all day alone makes the task of climbing out of it take a dozen moments. My spine croons like rusty hinges when I bend over to pick up a jumper. I spend a minute trapped inside it simply due to an inability to muster the strength it takes to tug the collar over my head.

Their stares corrode my chest as I descend the stairs but I don't lift my own from my feet. I step between them without addressing either to open the front door and manage some sort of mumble about going outside. I hold it open: an invitation for them to leave and never come back.

They turn to face me a metre away as I close the door and remain on the step. The day is overcast and the cement is frozen under my bare feet. I curl my toes and shift my weight to the edge of my soles to minimise the surface area sentenced to suffer the cold.

They go on about how worried they are. They haven't heard from me for twelve days. I haven't answered my cell. They've tried to come see me five times, he's tried fifteen. My brain focuses instead on the chirp of hungry house sparrows that wait for food in the oak at the end of the street and I can't find the mechanism to redirect my attention. Eventually, their voices fall silent.