L'Appel du Vide (Nocebo Effect P3)

Prologue

There is nothing, just as there has always been, but this time it's a vivid nothing, like I've seen it before but hidden from it because I was scared. I should be scared, in fact, though I'm oddly interested in the haze that's settled over my vision like dust settles over an old mirror, and that mirror must be me, for I am too old to be narrating the story of a seventeen year-old boy, but this seventeen year-old boy has just committed suicide, and this must be heaven, if it exists anyway.

I'm finding myself blurred in atheism and believing that there is a Hell to punish me for the sins I've whisked into existence, and perhaps it's only exclusive to me, because I'm sure that I've sinned far too much to slide by with impunity. Other people have done nothing when their flaws are placed on a pedestal chaining their legs to its marble, and they are explicitly innocent when one glances at my dirtied face stained crimson by my own blood and the blood manifesting in the nightmares of those I tortured with my absence, but I digress. This is becoming too inappropriate for those who deem themselves capturers of air to shove down their throats just as I shoved Tums down my throat and died, but alas, I did not, because I'm speaking in riddles this very moment to hide the fact that I have no idea where the hell I am.

Anyway, the reason I consider myself so old is not because I have creased my skin with wrinkles from excessive worrying or can barely stand up straight or play a weekly game of bingo with the local elderlies every Friday night, but because I have seen too many monstrous things to regard myself as a babe innocuous of any crime. I have matured beyond compare, and my voice now withers with each breath I seize to expel words that mean nothing, because I'm dead, or at least I should be, and no one listens to the dead when they cry for mercy or deliverance or for the living to stop worshiping them by clearing their faults like they clear their windows to see precisely, yet they never see precisely when it comes to the fallen victims decaying in the dirt that they tend to because once again they didn't listen to the dead when they tell them that this is all just an unnecessary surplus to soothe a guilty conscience shared pandemically by the breathing and beating and pulsing.

I have always abhorred being among that group of people who thinks their devotion to people that cannot hear them is the perfect solution to their lack of a moral compass. They're striving to achieve things that they cannot have, and I was praying atheistically that I would be resigned to the grave so that I would never witness this pettiness ever again, as my lids will be crisped against the chill of the dirt and the seeds and the cracking wood of my coffin, but that is not the case for me right now, and I have no clue why that is.

I'm pretty sure I'm waking up in a hospital room, and I am not gone as I had expected. My pills hadn't worked. My heart is still shuddering in its cage of lungs blood and and matter that still exists, and I can breathe again.

This is no blessing, for I want so desperately to be gone, but I am not gone, and it suddenly strikes me that I hurt people over this. My own suicidal thoughts harmed the one I loved the very most, whose name or face I do not know. They did harm this one, and there's no denying it, or else a proponent of the opposite will be labeled a fool. My insecurities were everything that killed me with that sweet dagger of poison, but still I am not dead. Why am I not dead? Why do I, of all people, deserve to torment others with my emptiness like this? How is any of this fair?

It's not, none of it, because the space that I consume should not affect other people as it so ruthlessly has, and the ones that I loved should not have to suffer through my choices that were poorly made and ridden with teen angst and trivial woes, and the doctors at this hospital I presume that I'm in should not have to save me, for I do not wish to survive, and they need not waste their glorious supplies on an inconsolably bratty kid like me.

So to save the doctors as they might've saved me, I want to go back, go back to that time where I was jumbled in a haze of bright lights and fancy colors and all the wonders I could never see as an ordinary mortal remaining to go about their day with the misconception that what they do somehow means something to the universe. I want to feel the stray clumps of mud in my coffin sifted in between my frozen fingers. I want to feel my lips paint a sickly blue and a sickly white over a beautiful red, want to feel the tenderness of an ebony suit too decadent for decay in its hand-washed state, want to feel like my problems are no longer significant six feet under the ground, want to feel like my issues never thrived off of my anxieties and not once call myself the fool I call others for desiring the same prospects.

If no one has caught this, I am the most blatant example of a hypocrite you could ever discover on this planet. I am a liar and blame others for miscommunication. I am the knock you hear at your window before I flee because I'm a fucking coward and name others the same to protect my starving ego. I'm just searching for evidence to convict people that stuck by me as I most likely never would for them, and I've fucking wrecked my life.

However, this life should be over. Those Tums should have maneuvered their calcium carbonate across the seas of scarlet dictators correctly, should have killed me then and there. These doctors should have left me alone, yet they're struggling to electrify my molding body that never wanted to escape my mother's womb in the first place. I wish I could stay inside that chamber of gestation and never come out, because the world is terrifying, and I am afraid. I am afraid, and I am the coward of whom I speak so negatively, and I am my own scapegoat when I need to be, because no one else elects to be around me when all I want to do is release my anger onto something who will provide me with a reaction, but that's abusive, and I shouldn't do it. I shouldn't be here, either, but I am, and I hate everything that made it this way, that kept me alive, that shot energy into my pulse, that told me it's such a relief that I'm alive, that became more of a liar than I ever was.

I dread liars, but I am one, so I guess dreading myself is what commanded me to devour those tablets like I was a lion who hadn't hunted in three days and is absolutely miserable, but in three days I can be resurrected like Jesus with the magic of those calcium carbonate pills, except it's an inverted scenario where my resurrection is actually my death and my supporters don't praise my return because I never had supporters at all.

I'm lonely as fuck, and I'm dead as fuck, and I'm mourned as fuck by someone I don't even know but suspect is weeping over the grave that I most definitely don't possess yet, because I'm still fucking alive in a hospital room whose setting I cannot decipher through bleared vision and heavy drugs to sustain the life that I have always despised maintaining throughout seventeen dreary years of existing and prolonged decades of mental aging and nothing to rock me to sleep, or nothing that I can remember.

It's not so much that I don't want to remember, just that I'm fearful of the pain to be derived from remembering anecdotes that prompted me to leave the person of whom I currently have no memory, only a fucking outline that doesn't mean shit to me, doesn't ask me if I want this person's appearance in the life that's been fucking spurred back into fucking reality without my proper consent, but if I'm to be trudging through even more decades of agony, then I demand the companionship of someone to trudge through them with me, but that someone I grope my hands around blindly is unfamiliar to me in the sense that I know nothing about him, but I know his shadow like I know words on the tip of my tongue — isolated but feasible, just out of my reach, craved as wholly as I crave the sweet release of death.

I need this man, and I'll make it my duty to find him.

~~~~~

A/N: bruh

yes, this is dual narrative, yes, you can read l'esprit d'escalier simultaneously, yes, I will emotionally wreck you, yes, you can feel free to comment because I'm always a slut for comments, yes, ted cruz is the zodiac killer, YES I HAVE NO LIFE AND BRING YOU HOMO YOU'RE WELCOME

~Dakota