Pieces

At any given moment, I am three different people.

They get along, mostly. Just looking at me for a moment you wouldn't be able to tell. But they are there. And sometimes they split.

There's the one I like to call the face. Their job is to regulate the outside, what happens once a signal leaves the brain. They control how I move when my mind goes on autopilot, how I speak when I have nothing to say. They are the facade that allows me to function without spending hours on a single action.

They are also the barrier between myself and the world. Some days I will split, and the others two "me's" will watch my life play out from behind a glass barrier. The face will take over completely, and if the rest of me wants to join they have to wait for the signal to reach through the glass wall, like a swimmer trying to push their way through rough waters. It takes time, and once it reaches behind the barrier it has been bleached, faded, the color drained from it and any urgency with which it might have been used is forgotten. Very rarely does the face ever hear back.

The other two, I have named calm and color. Color is my heart, my soul, all the emotions that could ever be. Calm is concerned with which emotions I get to feel. Calm makes sure that every feeling fits the situation, both in type and intensity. Color is what lets me feel at all. It is the rush of adrenaline and the quiet of peace, it is the bright light of glee and the torrential rain of anger. The two are in my mind, hidden from the outside.

On a good day, the three work together perfectly. The face will see an event and relay it to my mind, color will react, and calm will filter out the unnecessary emotion and send what's left to the face. On a good day, everything is normal, and they work so well together that they are almost one person. One me.

On a bad day, any number of things can happen. Sometimes calm and color will be trapped behind that glass wall, leaving the face scrambling to keep up. Those are days when two-thirds of me are gone, leaving what's left to act on pre-recorded patterns.

Sometimes, the glass wall breaks-

No, it shatters.

Color wins on those days, and everything is different. Everything I could ever feel, I do. I cry at invisible things and scream at the slightest movement, I slam my head against the wall at any frustration and I hide at any sound. I am nothing but color, and everything is so vibrant and powerful that I think I might go blind. I am drowning in a three-inch puddle and there is nothing I can do. The face disappears and everyone sees exactly what my mind tells me.

Other days, calm wins. Often this is after color's rampage, but who can tell? Certainly not me, on days like these. Days when calm takes the wheel are days when color has no voice, when there is no emotion to be found. The face operates as normal, told mechanically when to laugh, when to cry, when to speak and when to be silent. But now there are two glass walls: One between my mind and the world, and one between my heart and my head. Color and calm. Nothing can pass through that barrier, and I am drained. Calling the world black and white would be generous, because it's more like grey. I know when I should react, but I don't. I have no control over myself. I am on autopilot, saying what I think I mean but not being quite sure, wanting to quit every second of every day but not knowing why. Wanting nothing more than to close my eyes and sleep but not having the energy to drag myself into bed.

At any given moment, I am three people. Occasionally, thankfully, they are one. But there are days when they break into pieces, and on those days I cannot even remember what it is like to be whole.