In the darkness I trail my hand along soft walls, brushed smooth with striking colors, muted by twilight. Each step brings me closer to you, to the memories left cold and aching in my head. I wander into the darkness, letting the cool shadow press against my tired flesh.

Somethings wrong, I can feel it, I just don’t know what.

Then, the sounds hit me, an overwhelming tide of noise. They bludgeon my flesh with each step.

Falling water crashes about my ears.

Step.

A callous canon of footstesps beats like a drum in my heart.

Step.

Voices shout in the darkness, pressing hard against my skin.

Step.

Ringing steel.

Step.

Faster. Faster.

Horses hooves. Angry voices. Snow against windowpanes. Bells. Cries. Pain. Fear. Alone.

Step.

A chill pounds at my clesh with bone aching fury.

Step.

I stumble from it all, my mind reeling, confused, on the brink. Shadows lurk like shapes beneath dark waters, swimming towards the little pieces of me still left hanging on.

Then the warmth hits me.

I escape the shadowed place full of noises, trading it for warm light.

I’m plunged into a field of glass flowers stretching past my vision in waves of mirrors. They tumble back and forth, intertwining with the buzz of bees and soft, soothing voices. I’ve done it, I’ve lost my way, I’m in Wonderland.

Scatters of color shift in the light, dancing through translucent petals, bringing them to life in rose and gold. I turn and there I am, stretching out into the field of infinite flowers, brittle and fragile as glass. The light turns green, red, gold, a sunset that never ends.

I look back at myself, a somber face amongst the flashing glass. The eyes are too hollow to be my own, the body sags with a weariness too great for the excitement it feels in high mountain passes.

I can’t handle those piercing eyes, pupils so small the sunburst of gold around them takes my soul.

I move farther, escaping myself.

I step into a yellow room, with yellow paintings and a yellow mood. The walls are the type of sunny glow that is plastered on your friends face before you find out they’re depressed, your parents faces before you realize they’re getting a divorce, your face before anyone realizes you’re dead inside.

There are two chairs in the room, I sit and wallow in the shallow yellow of it for as long as I can. I need to rest my tired feet.

Your voice is all around me, a friendly chatting thing. I can see through it as well as I see through my own. It’s a sham, a thin rind of small-talk hiding the bitterness below. I sit and listen until the fervor of madness behind the words drives me out. Then, the voices grow, an overwhelming crescendo of anger until it beats against my ears, worming words of frenzied panic into my skull.

I am back running in the dark, an anxious and burning knot of spiraling fire in my chest. My fingers curl into fists to keep from trembling, the darkness folds around me like lovely wings. The fire moves towards my throat, but I swallow it down and fight through the twisted veil of shadow in front of me.

I can’t escape, not from myself.

And then I’m here.

Not again.

A room of shattered mirrors, reflecting a shattered form.

I study it, the face splintered into a dozen pieces. My eyes are unnatural in the purple gloom.

Am I this broken thing?

I walk across the wall, watching my body dance over tilted reflections. It takes but a moment to ease the panic in my chest when I find a place where my face disappears and my body twists oddly beneath me.

My face is a mask, but my body is as hollow as I am.

I stare at it until the whispering shadow and tumultuous energy in my chest stops telling me to run. I stare until I’m numb. I stare until the dream falls apart.

Then I move on.

The curtains part and the stars shift behind curved barriers, honeycombs of purple and white twisting into a starry sky. I lean against a wall in the darkness, stare at the shifting pattern of colors that make up this starry room, and let myself go.

The noise is soothing.

A few single tones humming, trying to drown out the chaos from only a few steps away. This place doesn’t seem like there are monsters beneath it’s dark surface. The air tastes cool and calm, it soothes the demons lurking in the locked corners of my brain.

I close my eyes and drift in this subtle world of brush strokes and broken mirrors, glass flowers and yellow rooms. I close my eyes and breathe in the hum of soothing tones. I close my eyes to the rapid staccato of my heart, the twisted serpent in my brain, the feeling that I will never truly know what I am meant to do.

I close my eyes.

This world is chaos, but in this chaos we keep moving. You stop running away from your problems. You stop shoving your feelings beneath layers of repressive memories. You stop worrying about how you don’t feel like you fit in.

In this chaos we find our starry sky and let it all go.

We let all the noise go.

This world isn’t about that whispering darkness telling you to run, its about the moments between, the soft brushstrokes that paint the gaps between the broken glass and funhouse mirrors.

I breathe until the nightmare softens beneath my skin and my blood sings sweet in my veins.

I breathe until the dream returns.

In Amsterdam I went to the Van Gogh Museum. A multisensory exhibition there took you through the mind of Vincent and his descent into madness before he shot himself. Barrages of sound and color and odd rooms portrayed moments in his late life. This is my take on the experience.