Facing the Dead End

She was fighting something she could not see. The Invisible Tarbaby.

It was always there and she could feel it, and it was attached to her like a Siamese twin, only in a deeper more nefarious way, as if like molasses it had seeped inside all her cells.

The image of the great molasses factory disaster and molasses flood of early Boston came to her. What year was that? And how many people died? Winter of 1919. Molasses moving down a street at 35 miles an hour. Twenty one dead, one hundred fifty injured. Many horses drowned.

There was also the Old South. There was tar and feathering. There was dark and deep Africa. There were people and there were lions.

Genetics themselves were sticky.

The history of the world. It was filled with suffering.

The pain was often like a black cloud floating in the brain.

She was fighting this thing she could not see. She could not give in to it. She wanted to breathe and keep her head above water, and giving in would mean leaving this life. She wasn’t talking about suicide. She was talking about the feeling that it was like there was a rock growing on a nerve which was attached to the flap that held open her consciousness, and that if the rock crystal grew any heavier or larger it would close off her right eye and plunge her down into an unconscious abyss.

At some point it would suffocate her basic breathing systems, not in her lungs but in her brain. Something was causing a falling down pressure, while meanwhile something else was unravelling.

It was all a circus.

She could also sense the strong will to live. And the trapeze artists throwing new ropes, and bringing in more horses and elephants, trying to erect more scaffolding. Lights and neurons were being strung. There were clowns but instead of their usual antics they were muscled and busy hoisting and lifting and running about with miniature trampolines to catch anyone from the high wire act who might slip and fall. There was still some glitter and sparkle.

And thank God no sign of the clowns on stilts who had so scared her in her childhood.

She did not really know what going mad felt like.
But she now felt certain that intense unremitting pain was one of the pathways there.

She had awakened in the morning with an image that she was a small mouse who had gone a long way down a maze, through twists and turns, thinking it was adventure, thinking it was progress, only to find then that this was a dead end.

The road back was so long. And didn’t all the mazes just end up the same way?

She stood there stunned, facing the dead end.

Was it possible to make the long trip back?

Or could she wait there in her little mouse body and hope and pray and call out, “Hey Researcher. Researcher, can you please start me over at the beginning of the maze? Hello?”

Would the researcher come and pluck her up and start her off again at the beginning?