Скачать или смотреть "Night Time Routine" (Original Slam Poem)

"Night Time Routine", a poem about mental health, or rather illness, written and performed by Josi R.

Text:

I always say I’ll go to bed early today. But it’s already later than last night, and I’m still dressed. And still crying, and it’s hard to find the right blanket that will help you sleep when your vision is blurry.
I have long forgotten what I’m crying about; it might have been something small in the grand scheme of things, it probably was, but when your entire body is a wound, any touch will be a trigger that shoots pain through your back and chest, your legs and arms. It feels like they don’t belong to me, like this shell is something that could burst at any minute to reveal a dark pulsating core I don’t think I’m prepared to see.
My head hurts.
Air flows through me like a burden. Breathing should be an easy task but it’s not when your heart is so heavy that it weighs the rest of your body down.
Out of the corner of my consciousness I can hear myself laughing, which makes as little sense as the tears, but I laugh a lot - it sounds hollow. Like the echo in a cold hall with glass windows in metal frames. And it fades, it always fades, and the ever reoccurring absence of sound makes the emptiness a vault for my hopes; I can never find the key.
I want to tell myself “hold on”, “it gets better”, but while I used to wish that saying these words over and over until I believed them would become the root of my new happiness, it has become yet another source for misery: they’re mocking me. They escape before I can understand them and what they leave behind is a footnote I forgot to read: “it never has”. Each time the words roll from my lips , they leave an acid taste, and before I can spit it out, the poison has trickled from my tongue into my throat, it’s spreading through my lungs and down my ribcage, soon it will reach my bloodstream and once more, sadness has become such an integral part of me that sometimes I’m scared for it to leave because I don’t know who I am without it.
I think it might be raining. I’m not sure, I can no longer distinguish between a thunderstorm and my soul screaming in agony. There is so much noise in my head; people keep wondering why I flinch at the slightest of sounds but everything is so loud; it’s like someone is shouting at me from seven different directions in three languages, I’m trying to make out the words but they’re not mine to grasp, and when I cover my ears, the noise climbs down my spine and whispers to me from there. It unfolds around my shoulders in a tight embrace, pulling them back, keeping me upright, and yet it is the very thing that’s pushing me, hoping I will trip just so it can catch me at the last minute and convince me that I need it in order not to fall. I can’t trust myself anymore because I don’t know which voice is mine.
And so I sit, tears and rain staining the window like another sad movie cliché, except in the movies, everyone gets to walk away from their sorrows to live their happiest lives, but I wonder how that works when in reality the thing you have to move on from is yourself.
And I never found that blanket and by now it’s too early to still go to bed, but maybe that’s all right because at least I got through the night. And I'll go about my day and when people ask if something is wrong, I’ll tell them "I’m just tired", as I wonder when they will realise that this has been my answer for the past 238 days.

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A closing thought:

I was originally going to film this in front of a blank wall and standing up and much more performance like, but then I realized I was already sitting on my floor at 11pm and this captured the essence of the poem much better. Quite possibly the rawest video I have filmed thus far. I won't give you the outtakes, but just know I now have several minutes footage of me crying. Nice.