nat raum
nat raum
nat raum (b. 1996) is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of this book will not save you, fruits of the valley, random access memory, and others. Past and upcoming publishers of their writing include Gone Lawn, Split Lip Magazine, beestung, and BRUISER. Find them online at natraum.com.
Settling: After a Lyric by Death Cab for Cutie
the sound of reggaeton vibrating through the floor of a house you toured during the daytime, when there was nothing to break your steely focus on the way your insides turn every time your brain convinces you he doesn’t love you like that. the sound of neighbor caterwauling like you wish you could, were everything not stuck in the space between your ribs and your soft tissue. the sound that makes you come to realize how much you value silence.
the explorative nature of a thought—you know, the way it zaps through a myelin sheath, multiplying then evolving—is a pet favorite thing to explain. you have always been one for metacognition, especially lately. if you weren’t thinking about what and why you were thinking, the thoughts would fill you like a vat of acid, corrosive and ever-expanding. this is sometimes a bad thing, because it sounds like you are making excuses when you explain the origins of your most destructive urges.
the light through the courtyard windows at the psych hospital. the sun poised high over elkridge as you drive yourself home each day. the soft glow of incandescent lamps in your usual therapist’s office. the fucking overhead fluorescents in the IOP therapy rooms. you are a photographer—you are always thinking about light, even in the metaphorical sense. the light within you only shines in silence, easily overwhelmed by the weight of the world. silence is as common in your everyday life as inner peace—it eludes you.
sometimes you wish you were perfect. you forget that no one is, and use the word to mean untainted by mental illness. you know there is inherent wrong in referring to yourself as tainted, but it’s hard to feel any other way. complex post-traumatic stress disorder has played cat’s cradle with your nerves, leaving them tangled for someone else to manage later. undiagnosed borderline personality disorder is the reason for half the trauma. alcoholism doused the fires you set with butane. you know everyone has their problems, but it’s hard to imagine that every single one of us has so many that spread their impact across so many aspects of life.
half a lifetime spent in therapy. a fifteen-year cocktail of benzos, antipsychotics, and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. a sudden onset of tinnitus and nerve pain, definitely spurred by years of chronic tension. a critical diagnosis arrived just four years ago. it’s around now that you start to feel the simmering within you dull to only a faint heat. you start to sit in front of your television without reaching for the remote, instead preferring to be alone with your thoughts, type them out until carpal tunnel forces a hard stop.
you still hold a bit of resentment for the bassline rattling your bed frame, the cries from the street, but when you are cradling your laptop in search of answers, it all seems to slink away, relegated to the same status as the ringing in your ears. there is only distress when you are paying attention to it. this is the sound of settling.