Dark Places || ONC 2023

Trashy

When Janelle was 13 and then again at 16 and 18 and 22 and 23 and again and again, she's walked into counseling appointments, and taken medicine for bouts of depression. She's your average everyday young woman trying to survive in a world that's trying to eat her alive. S

he's fought and scrambled, kicked and screamed and cried her way into something that feels like emotional stability. She loves her graduate program, and her friends. She has a distant but good relationship with her parents, and her sister. But she, like everyone else, has dark spots. There's been a broken heart here and there, and a best friend who turned on her, just as she was turning into herself. There's been name calling and close calls in bars and parking lots. She's taken those worst moments and feared them and felt them fully until she could hold them gently.

She's learned to hold herself gently. With a deep breath and the hard-won ability to be present she can now walk through a field and hear birds instead of the laundry list of things she should have done, and hasn't done yet, and the people she thinks she hurt, and the places she feels like a failure and a fake. She can hear the birds.

She learned to cry, and feel safe.

Safe.

There's no safety in this cavernous room, with broken stone people fighting to be born out of the garbage, and indifferent people with lighted ropes tied around their bodies.

Adam's mind is attacking them.

They need out. Janelle explains her theory to an out-of-breath Adam but doesn't offer up a solution. This is some amalgamation of their minds. The words taste like children's snacks on her tongue. It's easy, and stupid and illogical.

Adam listens with a thousand-yard stare. The bad nights, Janelle thinks. The nights she makes sure to drive him home, thinks about checking his cabinets for knives and pills, doesn't, but prays that she sees him the next day. It's that kind of thousand yard stare.

"I don't want to be here." Is all Adam says, after Janelle explains everything. She leaves out the bit about how if people are pouring trash into their bodies, it makes sense that it's turning and pushing itself back out of their skin. She figures he can put two and two together at a time when he's able to think a little more clearly. Maybe that will help him cure the disease above. Or maybe it will give him an answer as he watches their town die. Both possibilities make Janelle feel sick. Adam clearly doesn't need anything else on his plate.

Especially with the voices rising again. It's like a wave. A hand grasps at Adam's pant leg right after he declares his desire to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

"This was a mistake," he says. He jerks out of the grasp of the person, who might be a neuron, or a bad memory, Janelle's not really sure anymore.

Left her alone.

               11pm

                        1am

Janelle and Adam talked a lot in abstract over the last few months; What it felt like to be a failure, and how mortifying it is to exist at times, but it was never deep and never specific. They've rarely shared stories, both gun shy and terrified they'd lose one another if they offered a real truth. They're beyond that now. 

She scans the room looking for an exit, but it's not clear which tunnel they entered through. Even if she knew the way they got into the room was so scattered and winding she's not sure she could find her way out.

There's nothing. She grasps Adam around the waist and walks him to the right, back to the ground, and safely around the springs of a mattress, and the broken spokes of a tent. They walk down and around, weaving between hands reaching up for their ankles. The room is vast. They can keep walking. Keep outlasting the bad thoughts. She figures he's been doing that for years, what's a little longer.