I’m talking to a beta fish. It’s the wee hours of the morning, and here I am, talking to a scarlet scaled beta fish. His name is Greg. He swims in circles around his highlighter yellow submarine and through his mini forest of navy and carnation colored artificial plants. He seems content in his home. He lives life in circumlocution, every single day the same cycle.

Do I live a life of circumlocution?

I wake up. Limbs blindly grab at my nightstand for the bottles that hold my saviors. I pour the cocktail into my hand, toss them into my mouth, cock my head back with a sip of water and swallow robotically. The same limbs peel heavy comforters off of other limbs and slowly I slip to the floor. I pause for a moment, sitting on the powderpuff pink carpet or I bolt straight to the bathroom.

Something seems to hold my cascading locks back when the contents of my insides are poured into the toilet, my alabaster hand gripping to the handicap bar in the bathroom as if my life depends on it. By now, from hanging my head over for so long, my mobility has decreased. I waddle to grab my toothbrush, towel, contacts and face wash, hobbling to get back to the sink.

In a numb haze, I do what must be done. Transform myself each morning into a being that looks perfectly fine. Normal. Healthy even. Life is a thing to be lived in a disguise, masking the true horrors that lie beneath the surface of every scarred individual. We all have our stories, our pasts that have molded us into who we are today.

Are the people that we are, the people that we have become, people who we want to be? Is there a single person who can look in the mirror and honestly say they are content with who they are and the choices they’ve made to be who they are to this day? I know I can’t do that.

I’ve made mistakes- we all have. There’s always going to be the could have, should have, would have. The what-ifs. The way we wished we could have changed things. The way that if one decision was different, life would be altered within an instant.

Each morning, I look in the mirror at the sopping wet face of a girl who lives her life in circumlocution and who can do nothing about it. Or can she? Does she chose to do nothing about it? Does she live her life wishing and wanting that she didn’t do what she’s done? That she could’ve taken other paths and made other choices?

But if she’d done that, she wouldn’t be her. She’d be someone else. She wouldn’t exist.

That she, that me, sits here, pondering a life of redundancy to a beta fish. Because right now, the only one who’s awake to listen, is him.

xox,

M