Scribble #112

Quarantine



They say I shouldn't be here.
   They say I'm diseased.
   They say I shouldn't be.
   They say I shouldn't exist. Period. I'm an inconvenience for them.
   But I know I'm not. I know there is nothing wrong with me, but they are making me sick.
   But I escape, for survival. I escape to the one place where they can't break me; where they can't hurt me. It's the only place that is purely, undoubtedly mine right now. Where I am me, where I can always be me and still be excepted:
   My mind. My spirit.
   So as they strip me, beat me, spray me with a tidal wave force of water that suffocates, bruises, and smells like gas (especially the resulting, rising steam), I am at peace in a blue garden. In the soft nighttime it glows like lush, phosphorescent jewels. The stars in the open, vast, free blanket of the sky are shimmering, twinkling bright. Fireflies buzz about lazily and dreamily, never minding anyone else. Blue butterflies dance, leaving behind them a winsome, glittery trail. The moon, round and starkly white among the dome of stars, promises sugar and love. There is a koi pond in the center. It is here, on its porcelain tiled edge, where I can sit or lie down and just feel the easiness, the beauty, the happiness, the freedom, all around me. I smell plum tulips before I glimpse them in the grass the colour of cornflower and iris (the same flowers may have spawned this freshly conserved prairie). I'm sure that if there were cats, rabbits, foxes, snow leopards, gazelles, swans, peacocks, tortoises, and spiders, with their dewy webs, this garden would have made a complete menagerie.
   They dress me in plain, dirty white sheets (the smell of human decay not erased well), but in my mind's safe space I am wearing a silk lilac dress, which glows luminously with my pale skin. The brightness - the warmth and the sweetness - within myself, where all of my favourite things are stored, contrasts with the darkness and dirt and blood my physical body is subjected to. That brightness shines in my dark eyes. I think that scares them most of all.
   No matter what, however, they can't break me, or make me cease to exist.
   They can't erase my reflection.