tinc por de caure per sempre.
Every mind is a house.
Some rooms get used more than others; some floorboards are so familiar they're creased and creaking with memory. Dust collects in the attic, and in the basement your darker urges rattle, so you flip on every light switch when you go down, as though that will really help save you from yourself. Each of us makes our own monsters, amalgams of everyone we've ever met, and they live with us forever, sleeping in our beds and circling us in the night. Because of this, the houses we carry with us eventually become heavy enough to crush us under the weight of secrets on the mantle and hauntings in the foyer, so certain rooms must sometimes be condemned. On October 17th, an always-bruised psychic mind like a bombed-out mansion (like a mausoleum, caskets closed over certain secrets) makes its way to a run down home with a sloping roof on the outskirts of Boston. She greets the woman in the doorway in Arabic, and is received in kind; they're cordial, but they don't smile.
It's a simple place, off-white and wood inside with few pictures and closely cut proportions, the type of building they rent to college students or retirees. No one else lives there, just this dark-eyed creature in blue jeans and basic sneakers, like a kawwas if that weren't a tradition reserved for men. Hasibe doesn't know her, but they recognize each other by faith and fearlessness; this woman she is seeing, she is not a doctor. She is a five foot three inch fifty-year-old wrecking ball, and she is going to tear down walls. A doctor puts stitches in, keeping a mind full of devouring fire from folding in on itself--when there is so much blood the wound can't help but weep, that's what those little lines are for. Every psychic is born broken and oozing energy, and so sometimes closing the gash manually is necessary.
This woman is going to rip those stitches out.
The girl with the mind full of walls where there used to be doors lies down on a cot in a dark, sparse, room. It's small, and she can touch one end with her hands if she stretches outward and the opposing one with her feet. In the corner, a high window reflects early-evening sunlight, but Hasibe closes her eyes, and she sinks into the darkness behind her skin. At first there is silence, but that's just on the first level: the woman sitting next to her in a folding chair doesn't move, doesn't say much, but her mind is singing cries to their demiurge, invoking every serpent, every bird, and she has voice in the third realm like feathers on skin until they become more like little knives.
"It'll hurt more if you stay awake," the woman says out loud.
Hasi exhales, and she imagines her breath is smoke.
"I know."
Above her she hears noise like rustling, a crackle of wood rending in two, and now Hasi can smell the smoke but the house isn't burning because they are somewhere else entirely, with a skyline full of phoenix wings and shadow. Desert and stone warp her mind's eye, and she sees seven thousand years in seven instants, seven days--their shared history as it extends back to bare feet on sand at night. Years ago, she learned that ballet and beauty both are her best instruments of pain, so when her mind refuses to find the steps to this dance of destruction with the ease she once recalled, she lets it hurt. Let her participate; let her be an active heart in her own self-mutilation. To consecrate the sand and their dance, the bull they kill in this boundless otherworld of collective consciousness and constant creation, has, in Hasibe's mind, a man's face dual-sided in shadow and milk-white and firelight red, and their song becomes something like screaming, the name of a winged Creator echoing across the sky burning above.
The minotaur bleeds the same as anything, a rail of red into Hasibe's open palm. He is a dream she has had before, and she is sorry to sacrifice him as a part of herself, but this murder has always been waiting for a chance to happen. Since she boarded herself up she's felt the strain against the seams, the sense of some caged falcon inside waiting for the right death and the right opportunity to fly to her master. It might not help him much to know she shares every sensation, from the cut throat to the ache riding up her spiritual limbs like something small and many-teethed. There will be bruises, but no one will be able to see them; still, publicly visible or not, everything leaves a mark.
Every psychic is born broken. What permits one to receive is not a gift of the extrasensory, but a puncture, a bleeding wound on wrists and feet, a place where the hungriest of harrowing thoughts is looking for a new place in which to burrow. Thoughts are just wasps made from other people hunting for windows left ajar so that they can make their home elsewhere; every ghost is greedy; every fire is worse. The rattle of a door physically untouched during a nightmare is a reflection of endless input expelling like an illness. The hunger is the worst: it is unreasonable, and unlike the others, it is as natural as the sunlight that stopped shining through the little window three hours ago.
Every mind is a house.
When Hasibe opens her eyes, all her doors are open.