Broken Faucet

I look deep into the pool of water collecting in the sink. The faucet drips away in mockery of the handle turned to off.

The water is like skin. Similar to the way I once could see music playing in my head. I once saw sound the way ripples bend but never break the surface water. I realize, I cannot recall the last time I could see sound like that…

I was a child.

Drip, Drip, Drip. Dripping, the faucet is loose and all I can do is wonder why I can no longer see sound.

My mother wasn’t convinced. As a child I told her, over and over again, “Yes, when the bells chime every day, I see the sound like violet ripples in my sky.”

Then mother would say, “what sky?”

then I, “The sky within Ma, the sky within,”

She’d commence rolling her eyes up to the heavens as if exclaiming on behalf of angels, “ooooh!” a gasp, and then she went off to the next room.

Once ago I was younger and perhaps not sane. I feel most children aren’t quite sane. They talk about things that can’t be seen, they speak in direct manor and apparently, they see the way sound ripples across the mind. I was a strange child. I often picked at my skin because it hurt. I preferred it really. To feel pain on a regular felt, somehow, natural. Staring at walls I would imagine entire orchestras playing Bach or Mozart, then, I would imagine fire burning the orchestra’s halls to the ground. My father played the violin every night before he died. I was four.

Yes, I was an odd ball. Music was my propensity & for whatever reason the bells chimed, and I could see the way the sound made shapes in my mind. Of course, I was a bit, well, a lot OCD. I often focused on something like bells, or dripping water, or the way that blue bird repeatedly arrives at the same time every morning. Over the years I battered my OCD to a pulp with a handful of blue and pink pills, the worst of it did subside, so, living alone seemed like a reasonable idea.

Where was I?

Drip Drip.

The faucet needs to be tightened. I still have about a 15 min delay where I forget I do not live at home any longer and my mother is…. My childhood, a distant memory, two inches from my nose.

Mother was the one who fixed faucets. She wouldn’t be able to get away with not having the skill. According to my OCD, which now I think is probably some other diagnosis, I never had a proper shrink who could place me. According to my OCD, if the faucet couldn’t shut off the water flow completely, I had to watch the droplets fall until it stopped, I died, or mother fixed the issue.

When this first happened Mother chose to carry me out of the room assuming I was just being a weird child, but, after I bit her shoulder and consumed a disturbing amount of her skin then began convulsing in seizure, she realized something was wrong and I needed professional help.

It felt like I was being murdered.

I suppose that sounds dramatic, but I’m not so dramatic when allowed my proclivities. It’s just, I assumed after ten years of no symptoms, I was certainly in the clear. Yet now, like taking a portal backwards, I am back to It.

It feels like being stabbed in the chest when being forced to look away from water dripping from a broken faucet. It’s not water dripping in general, its specifically water droplets dripping from a broken faucet, with the handles all the way pulled back. If you tried to tease me and turn the knob even just a scoch, to cause the flow, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass. The knob has to be unsuccessful in shutting off when turned all the way.

So, Here I am, trapped, staring at this broken faucet in my single studio apartment, the heat of Manhattan’s August and my heart is what feels to be magnetically pulled to the frame. I tried looking away of course, yet just as before, my heart began pounding out of my chest, my mind hyper-focused and my eyes froze along with my entire body.

I am not sure if I am even blinking. In trance, the drip drip dripping making ripples on the water is all I can bare to see.

I would typically panic, but all I can think of are the childhood bells chiming and how I never noticed until now; I lost my ability to see sound in my sky.

“what sky?” I hear my mother now.

“The sky within ma, the sky within,” I am whispering now, suddenly crying. Warm tears falling away from me, the only part of me moving, as the rest is frozen in stare.

sudden bells chime down the hall,

I gasp, “oooooh!” My eyes roll up to the heavens as if exclaiming on behalf of angels.

…

I never fixed that faucet…