THE MUSEUM OF NUMB - by Nonso Obi

Things aren’t going as planned. I suppose that’s a ridiculous thing to write. What was the plan? To get through the day without feeling like I’m walking through wet sand? To complete a simple task without the mental circuitry shorting out? To want something, anything, with a clarity that isn’t immediately swallowed by fog? Lately, I haven’t been feeling really good. That phrase is too small, too neat. It’s like saying a forest fire is “warm.” I am not un-good. I am a quiet, internal collapse. Everything is just falling apart, but silently, in slow motion, like a building turning to dust behind a perfectly preserved facade. Emotionally, I am a flatline. A still pond with no bottom. Things that should sting—a missed deadline, a friend’s thoughtless comment—just land with a soft, dull thud and disappear. Things that should bring joy—sunlight on the floor, a song I used to love—feel like exhibits behind thick glass. I can see their beauty, I remember their meaning, but I cannot touch it. The connection is severed. I am curating a museum of my own numbness, pacing the silent halls of myself. My mental health is a mess. Not a dramatic, wailing mess. A stagnant one. A cluttered room where the door is jammed shut. Thoughts don’t flow; they pile up. Deciding what to eat feels like advanced calculus written in a fading ink. The simplest decision is a cliff face. I am trying, God, I am trying to put things in order. I make lists. 1. Shower. 2. Eat food. 3. Walk to school. The list becomes a monument to my failure. Normal hygiene feels like a problem of physics. The shower is a thousand miles away. The toothpaste cap is a puzzle. The energy required to lift the hairbrush seems to obey the laws of quantum mechanics, both impossible and certain at once. I watch my own hands move through these motions as if they belong to someone else, a dutiful but distant operator. I am very numb. That is the core of it. The numbness isn’t peace. Peace has a warmth to it, a softness. This is a cold, hollow absence. It’s the silence after the scream has evaporated. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s that the mechanism for caring has gone offline. I am a satellite, drifting, receiving signals but unable to transmit a thing back. I write this down not because I believe it will help, but because it is a single, small action. A proof of life. A scratch on the wall of this quiet cave. I am here. Even if “here” is a vast, undifferentiated gray. Even if the only thing I feel is the profound weight of not feeling.

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