Night Terrors [Frerard]

A Drink, For The Horror That I'm In

Soaked. Saturated in that glutinous liquid that stained the gravel, taking on a disgusting earthly hue. Everywhere screamed of its presence. All you could smell. All you could see. It flooded my senses. I couldn't think. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I was a paralysed Helen Keller who was caught in a one-person battlefield. I just wished it were me.

I was sure the world would be able to romanticise this too. Watch the world magically turn my mental torture, my incapability to be anything but a shell of a person, into a cutesy poem with a twist. Society was overpopulated by magicians. But you know what magicians were? Con artists. Illusions and distorted reality everywhere... everywhereeverywhere everywhrywhre wevreyhy...

Because the entire atmosphere reeked of the acrid, raw stench. Oxygen didn't seem to exist anymore. It was replaced. The world didn't exist. Everything that was left of the world was continuously gurgling from her severed chest like a chocolate fountain of body fluids.  It dyed her callused fingers. It framed her body. It accented the sidewalk. It stained my shoes. It drowned the air. It flooded my mind.

I couldn't even feel. I wasn't angry, I wasn't sad. I wasn't any of the words you'd flip your dictionary open to. All I could say was 'wasn't' because I didn't know what it was. I could eliminate what it wasn't. I'd never nail what it was. But I'll try anyway: it was an indescribable feeling of hollow and desperation. It was heartbreak amplified a million times and thrown down a rabbit hole. But I was being thrown down the rabbit hole too. And, sorry to bust your dream-bubble, not all rabbit holes led to Wonderland. 

Waves of desolation submerged my mind, asphyxiating me in the worst way possible. My lungs were ripped from within me and then used to gag me. I didn't bleed. I didn't cry. I wasn't even in pain. I just watched as it all happened. It wasn't an out of body experience. It wasn't an in-body experience. It was nothing. It was blank. It was like drowning without water. Dry, sick death.

 _____________________ 7:11 A.M. ___________________  

I was doubled over, the bed sheets balled in my shaking fists. I was hyperventilating to the point my lungs felt like they were made of thin lace. I was teetering on the edge of either dry-retching and puking my guts out. Instead, I did neither. I just let tears cloud my vision as I violently shook and collapsed in on myself.

It wasn't fair. This shouldn't have been happening to me. Of all the things I could've dreamt of, I dreamt of that. My mind must've had a lot of free time to conjure up the things it did... to toss me into nightmares of people I'd only ever heard of. It was like never being locked in the bottom of a ship, no windows to see the water. No way to feel the water. You had never had any personal experiences of water, just what you had heard from others. You were told about this water -- when one day you were tossed into the ocean.

I had been on a good streak. I hadn't had a nightmare since a week ago. I, instead, had empty dreams where I woke up feeling the same way I fell asleep; hollow. My nights were just filled with nothingness and NiQuil. My mornings were just blank and coffee. It was between heaven and hell; a tolerable purgatory. 

I took a shuddering breath, trying to compose myself. My lips were quivering as if I would start balling any moment now, but nothing came. I could feel tears stinging my waterline, but nothing dared to come forward. With pale skin that was even more sickly and pale than normal, puffy eyes, swollen lips, and a runny nose, I heaved myself onto the only thing that seemed unphased by any of this; my feet. 

I hunched over the sink in the still silent house, my brother already being gone for awhile now, and my parents still asleep. I started to splash the cold tap water onto my face and taking deep breaths. Anything to snap me out of this horror. Or, at least, to make my face look okay.