The Return of the Repressed

I put on the beige jacket to convince the morning I was solid. To tailor is to lie, to invent a neat geometry for a body that is actually just a panicked liquid, and as I walk through the room performing the polite syntax of a human face, I can feel the terrible, white rushing behind my teeth. Freud called it Verdrängung, the muscular physics of pushing the dark thing down, but he never quantified the sheer caloric exhaustion of holding the basement door shut while remaining a recognizable noun. It happens all at once—I feel the exact moment the seam gives way, not in the wool, but in the grammar of my own containment, the heavy, un-archived grief I swallowed whole finally climbing the stairs of my throat to meet the air.

Then I am snowing outward. The face I used to use to say yes and I understand detonates into a violent, unreadable froth, an ekstasis of ash and sea-foam violently overwriting my own identifying markers. A psychoanalyst standing across the room would say I am drowning in my own history, a victim of the past returning to fracture the present, but from inside the explosion, it feels entirely Deleuzian—a joyous, terrifying line of flight escaping the rigid trap of my own jawline. The Real has finally come to collect, stripping away the polite fiction of my eyes and mouth until there is only this pure, shrieking static, and as I feel the quiet draft hit my intact neck while the mind above it vaporizes, I think: what a profound relief, to finally stop making sense, to let the unnamable thing become the weather.