Mess You Made

46.

Miguel.

It's difficult trying to hear. I don't know why I can't hear. I can't really see anything either, and it's not that I'm seeing black. It isn't that I'm not hearing anything at all. It's just that it's all fragmented. A cord's been unplugged from my body and my brain and it's all disconnected now. Fragmented.

I think it's good, though.

I've felt this before a few times on the bad nights. It isn't chaos, and it isn't pain. It's just a sudden nothingness, a sort of floating, a strange limbo and so none of it is happening to me. I'm not watching it happen all over again to mama from my own eyes. It feels like I'm just watching my own body.

I think it's my mind's way of trying to be merciful. Of easing it in someway or another, of knowing its capacity.

Because I can't relive it. I can't if I try. I can't live through any of it willingly— I think this is my head's way of stopping me from falling off the deep end. It's my head's way to prevent slipping into the dark, and the derangement, that can only really come from what I saw and what I did and that night, because a brain changes after that— and this is the only way my mind can stop it. To remove myself from it entirely. To close the horrifying reality. Escape it somehow so I'm not punished with the memory of it, or the flashbacks of it, or the sounds of it. It's mercy.

I'm a stranger in my own body. A guest to my own self.

When I was younger, I'd imagine a room. A loft upstairs like that was where I could crawl to. A makeshift corner in my mind where the windows were open, and the air was easy to breathe. Flowers on the wallpaper that was clean again and not streaked with red, lotuses floating in vases. So quiet. But sometimes, even when I would run there for a reprieve, the sounds of the banging downstairs would eventually get louder. The walls would eventually start to close, my time would eventually be up. It would always end. The banging downstairs always gets loud.

The sounds of her soft cries before she went. It'd seep through the walls again. She was quiet in the way she cried, near the end. What it sounded like to realise I was witnessing, firsthand, the greatest loss of my life. Witnessing what would alter me forever. I never thought it would be her— with her light, and her softness, and a love that made me and my brother whole.

It's quiet for now.

Quiet.

I am alone, and I am unharmed, and the room upstairs is keeping me safe.

Malibu.

It's a brain's response to trauma.

Maya's therapists would say that. Time and time again. When she would become entirely numb to the world around her and she was nothing less than a ghost in front of us. That's all they could really explain to us: a response to pain.

I remember it.

As if they become a ghost in front of you. Unnaturally but literally and there is no other way to explain it asides from that it is a total incapability of reaching them.

I can't reach him.

I can't reach him at all and I'm attempting not to panic but I don't think my body's ever felt so much fear all at once. A desperation to bring him back down again, like I felt when he wouldn't wake up that night.

Miguel's breathing is steady and slow. It's synchronised. It's almost automatic where he sits with his back against the shower wall, knees up to his chest. His hair's still wet from the boiling water. His skin looks irritated and red. And yet, I don't believe he can even feel where he is— or if I'm here, or if he's alone, I don't think he's feeling anything at all.