The Disease of Minds

It begins slowly. At first, it’s not going out every Friday night, instead, you alternate every other Friday night out and in, out and in. Then Friday nights start being smaller, less glamourous sleepovers, avoiding the booming crowd. Instead, you only hang out with 4 friends, then 3, then 2, then 1.

Then you spend Friday nights on group Facetime, on Netflix Party, where you can easily escape the constricting conversations by the click of a button and claiming “It was an accident! Oh, my network crashed!” So you can silently slip into bed with a quiet sigh, in sweet silence.

The invites stop coming soon after that, people know you won’t show so they don’t ask.

The facetime calls end soon after that, everyone is getting tired of you avoiding their calls and your “botchy WiFi.”

A shell forms around your body, every knob jiggle, every ringing of your phone makes you flinch, makes you press against the wall of your shell. You run away like a chicken, every single time.

Silence becomes your best friend, your previous organized and color-coded and pristinely clean room becomes a pig’s den, the home of a hoarding slob, dirtier than the barn house of the cows and the pigs and creepy crawly critters.

The slightest smile from a stranger makes you feel claustrophobic in even the largest rooms, your lung drowning in the awkwardness your own mind produces.

Your lungs seem to shrink, your eyes narrowing to one single objective: the exit. Every single time, without fail, you run and run and run to that exit but can never find it.

So you pull away and away and away, isolating from those prying eyes, those smiling lips, those “kind” words.

You quarantine yourself from the population lest they catch the disease you carry in your mind, lest they isolate you by force.

So you rot and decay in the grave of your own traitorous mind’s making, where not even the most valiant knight can save you from.