With All My Senses

madness /noun/

a state of wild or chaotic activity

My head is throbbing, an invisible hammer breaking through my skull and destroying my neuron system. I bend and lift my arm to cover my eyes. The light in the room pulsating and vibrating, hitting my pupils with double force. It's so bright. I close my eyes shut, trying to block everything. My sense of sight almost blinded. If I try to look now, there would be just a blurry image in front of me. And it would attack me again just like the sounds.

Oh, the noise. I can't take it. I just can't. I don't want to! Make them stop, please somebody, make them stop! The voices shout in my head, thoughts of hundreds of people in this building are hitting me like a shock wave. I hear them, I hear them all.

Why won't this stop? What did I do to deserve this?

The image of a man falling down the stairs fills my mind. An open, gushing wound in his chest is marked with blood. He falls. The sound of his breaking neck makes my skin freeze like ice. I see him tumble down. I see his gun lay next to him. He's dead. And I killed him. I had no choice. It was me or him... but I shouldn't have taken his life. It wasn't mine to take. And it came with a price. I much bigger price than I anticipated. But I had to pull the trigger.

The voices in my head grow louder. They're surrounding me. Wherever I go they follow. I hear their pain, their fear... I hear death knocking on their doors.

Bang, bang, bang. You're next. Get ready. Last call. Make the drink good.

I reach out my hand and slide it against a wall, moving slowly as the pain threatens to open my skull right open, slicing it in half. I lift my eyelids slightly and disfigured streams of light slides against the surface of the soft tissue that surrounds my eyes.

I pull my hood up and cover my face with long hair. Their dark color turning them into a curtain that I can hide behind. I quickly find a seat and curl up in one of the plastic chairs set in a long line. I swallow hard as the fluorescent lamp above my head buzzes in a constant rhythm as if it wants to kill me in Morse code.

I start to sway on the chair, trying to block the voices in my head. Sweat running down my back. My face flushed as if in a feverish state. My cheeks blushing, while the skin around them is pale like wax. I don't even have to look in the mirror to know how bad I look. And to know how deep the circles under my eyes are. I clench my fists. I would scream from all the pain and the incentives that flooded my body... but that would only make it worse. I knew that because I've tried before. Many, many times. I screamed for so long after he died. First because of shock, then guilt mixed with denial... and finally I screamed because all the pain in the world seemed to get stuck in my head.

Like now. I came here for help. I needed some stimulants to make it all go away. I needed drugs or morphine. I needed to steal it because they would never give it to me from their own free will. Maybe they would try to treat me. Cure me. Fix me. But it was too late. No matter what they would do to me it wouldn't make it all go away. Because this would never stop, not unless I fought for my redemption. Unless I would help someone in need, or maybe I was just fooling myself. But I could feel it inside. All the sanity that I had left in me yelled. "Help them". I didn't know yet, who "they" were but I knew I had to do it.

Before it was too late.

Yet the hospital wasn't the best place for my condition. The pain and the fear bottled up in this building crushing me even more.