Jiminy Cricket

Sometimes you just have to get it out. Like an illness. The cursive sits in my veins like a poison, needing eradication, needing to be spit onto the tangible page. Physically visible so I can hate it from a distance, so my mind’s eye can take a brake (oh dear you have spelled “break” wrong) and my actual two eyes can try to make sense of the mess, of the hate, the love, the anger, trust, longing, confusion, understanding, ignorance, of the web that fogs the spectacle that my mind’s eye grows headaches in spending all damn day and the better part of the night peering out of. Or does it peer into the spectacle? Tell me, is Jiminy Cricket on the outside looking in, or is he looking out from the inside? Is that moral little bug a soul of his own, or is he an appendage of your imagination, designed to make the tough decisions for you because long ago some vehement authority told you you were incapable of conducting your own life? And now you’re thinking about the parent or that teacher or sibling or whomever of merit that told you how pathetic you were when really I’m trying to get you to remember if Mr. Cricket was even there before that awful person broke your heart or if there was no nagging voice, you just did it out of virtue of doing. You can’t remember. In fact, you can’t remember most of your childhood except that it might have been a happy one.

Isn’t that all that matters? That you were happy?

That insect-man drives me nuts. He chirps all day and I can barely get a pen to paper in time to write down his words. He chirps all night and I can’t find him, hiding in a corner of the room, chirping truths and to-do lists and regrets and worries and memories and day-dreams that will never turn into night-dreams because he will never let me go to sleep. And when I do finally sleep, when I do finally put the pen to paper, make the thoughts tangible, I can trap Jiminy in that paper and squish him to silence (not quite death, he will be back), I am asleep and an otherness that the professionals call my “subconscious” takes over.

And that’s when I truly live, in my sleep, not trying to control the quiet images surfacing after a long day of being talked over by Jiminy Cricket, the moral compass of torture.

We love to go to sleep, to be unaware, hating to wake up and acknowledge the night as a love lost, a love you didn’t really know when you had it but you love it now nonetheless. And while you were floating through that other place where things just happen and no one seems to decide or ponder or triangulate, Mr. Jiminy Cricket was regaining his strength, crawling out of the paper, out of the trashcan, back into his corner, picking up his fiddle of morality, rousing you, to start the day, to start the madness that sits just behind the gleam in your eyes, all over again.

Rereading this made me tired.

Arrivederci,

Abigail