You really have no idea what you did to me.
I wish I could tell you what you've done, what you've accomplished, with your dedication and efforts to shake me from what I was trapped inside. You have no idea what I was in, what a nightmare it was; it wasn't until later that I could hear my own screaming. I was deaf from the sound. I, the self you could only see, was dying, starving, thirsty and cold. You reached me, only enough to keep me alive, but you could have never gotten past what I built for myself; I was sure to keep everyone out, to lock myself inside my own mind forever, to keep everyone at a far distance. For a while, I was quiet. I was content with being locked in that place, that small, sacred, safe place, for the rest of my life.
But you changed that. You, you insignificant human, you who didn't judge, who didn't pry or hunt or act malignantly, you who had no intention of being with me... You broke into me, like a fucking robber in a mansion. Similarly, you had no idea where to go to find my sleeping, near comatose body. And for a long time, the locked princess's keeper, the guardian, hated you. She wanted you out; you were evil; you were a danger to my way of life and she hated you for that. You were going to mess up everything. But my persona was deaf and blind; she heard nothing. She had no idea what kind of a threat you posed.
But the guardian knew. Oh yes, she knew what you were going to do. And she exhibited fear as a defense; she made me as afraid as I could be of you. So fearful that I began to show physical signs of trauma. The nausea. The shakes. I was afraid and I had no idea why.
The "sleeping" figure, representing the separate part of me that I require for critical thinking and basic problem solving; and I, the creative, the dictator, the physical figure, the controller; can control this being in separate but equally powerful ways. We were born to work together to create a functioning, logical human being, but the sleeping figure was heavily damaged due to traumatic events, and it was in my best interest that it grow separately from myself; we did not work together for the duration of my adolescence. Once in a great while we would communicate, but only for necessary or vital events. This is why we "put her to sleep".
She slept from age 11 to age 16, guiding me only through the necessary steps to becoming a powerful thinker and an emotionally stable being. She disappeared completely in the destruction of 2007, when the reconstruction left her exhausted body inside of a cold, metal, inaccessible room, where she would quietly lay for the next 3 or 4 years. A creative psychosis had its opportunity to blossom into a surreal and distant experience, leaving me with only traces of memory for that given year.
And then, you.
You, the realist, the tangible thinker, the only other mind that truly saw inside of my own. You, perhaps, were the most surreal experience. The deaf persona idly observed your bewildering behavior while deeper layers, more intrigued and thoughtful layers, dissected every word, every sentence structure. A silent obsession bloomed from the seed of your inspirational thoughts, communicated quietly under a mask of rough conversation.
It was like you spoke to me, to only me, for such a long time. Your youth masked, or even removed completely, your allegoric ability to communicate, and I've often re-dissected the things that you've said only to find the lack of meaning in them, but other things, such as this song, have proven themselves to be direct thoughts from you, that you've wished in the past that I could have heard you say.
If I could only go back then and reciprocate or reply to everything you've tried to tell me. If only I could tell that young, virtuous version of you, so full of love and loneliness, that I'm not, nor ever was I dead. If I could only show you who you release, and what you teach me with your heart and your wonderfully optimistic mind. If only I could show you the quiet, beating heart behind the dead, decaying tissue of the past passions and teenage infatuation that was born to die. If only you could see me for what I am now. If only you knew back then that sleeping beauty was never dead. If only my eyes would have opened the second before you turned away from my pale, poisoned face forever. Things may have been different then.
But when you left, my eyes opened. I was not awakened, but reborn, as a deaf, blind, dumb, and lame mute; I was incapable of contacting you in any possible way; I was trapped inside of my own mind, stuck in paralysis. I was locked in, and you were leaving with the impression that I was never to return; that I was merely a daydream. I couldn't even make contact with my conscious mind until the reassembly.
It was when I woke up that I felt this assembly, of all these parts of me: the persona, the guardian, and the sleeper. It felt as if I was rising at last to break the surface of a great, dark, and endlessly deep river that I had been held in for years; the approaching, glimmering light of my conscious mind was perhaps the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. All of these metaphors, this is how it felt.
This is what you did to me.
You, you insignificant human being. You outsider.
You weren't in my head. But you were. And you are. And you always will be.
The part of me that wants to kill you, died for you to stay alive.
Sleeping Beauty never died. She was
locked-in.
