A scream from the left. A hysterical laugh from the right, and profuse bleeding through my nose. These thoughts, voices, words, sounds—everything—that I’m hearing, they can’t be real. But, they must be real. How in the world could they exist without being so? I feel like I’m laughing, screaming happily, crying with joy, but my body is in terrible agony. I am screaming in pain on the outside. Something on my arm is stinging, warm, and wet, and I can’t help but feel faint. Maybe its with happiness, and it’s beginning to overpower and destroy the former. Or, maybe not. I’m seeing myself, from eagle point. But, I am also seeing the other me, the worse, more horrifying me, and I am also seeing one other. Myself in my minds eye, in my body, looking down at the fingernails on my arm. And I realize, I’m skinning myself alive.
This feeling—it feels quite natural, as everyone around me does it too. They scream as I do, in misery and in elation, and the blood begins to pool on the floor as the screams grow louder and louder, drowning out my own thoughts and cries of anguish as I soon become nigh deaf from the quaking sound.
As I look down at the scarlet floor and stare, openmouthed and curious, my heartbeat slows and my head spins slightly. But the other reality is still there, still grinning stupidly at the scarlet grooves and white bone in my arm, scarcely affected by the thoughts that batter this brain. I fall, and it feel s like I am falling down miles and miles of air, through a shaft of sweltering fire, to a black abyss of netherworld before I finally land and break. I have left. The pain leaves me and I’m left to look at the body below me. It has bloody tears streaked down its pale and forebodingly shadowed face, and the body is so frail it looks as though if it moves, every bone will snap. There is no skin on the right arm of her, and blood completely puddles the tiny floor in a quarter inch tarn all the way around. I look around, trying to find, to reach out to, the people who were brutalizing themselves around me, but I comprehend now that I was alone. But I look to the corner, and there is a howling, quivering mess of body. And it is then that I realize that I was not alone. No, of course I wasn’t. You’ve been there the whole time. I’ve been incapable, inflexibly so, to voice. For years, even. Those screams of agony, they were neither mine, nor my fictional audience. They were yours. And the screams of hilarity and bliss were failed attempts at my pain coming out through reverberations.
Of course, oh, of course. I was never alone in my tormenting and actions, in my shrieks and howls, in my moans and troubles. You joined me. Always, you joined me and told me It would get better. You were wrong, oh, were you so wrong. You were the one inflicting upon me the wretchedness and desolation I felt. And now I know, you were never even there In the first place. I. Was. Always. Alone.
