Noah's Lark

Noah's Lark

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

You still need a reason.

That’s what you tell yourself as you sit there, constantly tapping away at the wall beside you, then at the side of your head and back again, slamming your fingers over and over against hard plaster and your own skull until they turn numb, just aware enough of it as you’re doing it to hate yourself for the stupid meaninglessness of it, but never aware enough to tell yourself why you’re doing it, to see some pattern in this burst of idiotic chaos.

You still need a reason for it when you crawl into bed and spend what seems like hours rubbing your face into your pillow, and against the skin of your teddy bear, revelling in its texture — if you can even call it reveling, because there’s no real joy in it, if it’s anything it’s a compulsion, as if you’re not really there in the bed, and able to let yourself sleep, until you’ve made yourself raw with its subtle and strange roughness.

You still need a reason for the way you’re not at a place until you’ve felt it, the way you’re not really there in that moment until the cold marble and crumbling stone of it has left some subtle sensation in your fingertips.

You still need a reason why the looser, rougher drawings you do, and the darker and grainier photos you take, end up meaning more to you than anything too polished and precise — you need a reason for the yearning you always have for control, in spite of the deeper satisfaction you have in chaos.

You still need a reason for the way you laugh when nothing around you is funny, and the way you want to bawl when you don’t have a single goddamned reason in the world to be sad.

You still need a reason for the strange music you’re always making — the clicking and snapping of your most restless and absorbed moments, the drifting hums of drifting hours, the laughlike breathing of manic minutes keeping their own bizarre beat, the tuneless croaks of your depressive descents the nearer you fall to the point of impact. You need a reason for the silences you can never allow yourself to savour, the stillness you can never allow yourself to claim.

You still need a reason for the foot-pounding, for standing so long at the sink letting water run over your fingers, for staring into bright lights, for constantly picking your own face apart, for taking things literally that a four-year old would know not to take seriously, for pressing your skin against very warm or very cold things to the point of pain that you know you shouldn’t be able to bear, for whole days of your life lost in a place that — when it’s at its very worst — seems more meaningful, and more real, than your everyday life.

And you need a reason for it that does not call itself autism or OCD or bipolarity. You need a reason that has no easy labels, no quick fixes, no medications or drugs — a reason that doesn’t make this big part of your existence seem in any way small. You need a reason that keeps the whole big fucked-up mess of it all as big and fucked and messy as ever, but still gives you room to be a little more than that.

On the good days, its label isn’t autism or bipolarity or anything else — it’s only Noah.

On the very good days, that’s almost good enough.