Torment

Prologue

Voices are raised as they start ripping at each others throats. Yet again. They are arguing about a car. A car.

"Why did you have to sell the car?" she asks. "Why, out of all the things you could have done, did you have to do that?" He doesn't reply as he hopes she will stop interrogating him. Fat chance of that; I know.

She carries on shrieking at a pitch unknown to mankind. What they don't realise is at this same moment I am lying in bed. I hear the noise, the uproar created by the chaos. Yet I'm used to this and accustomed to the tearing of my heart inside my chest.

I lie in tears of lost hope and desperation in that little room upstairs. Somehow I still wish that this is a dream, not the reality that it is. I know it is true deep down but I smother that feeling. I have to. It's for my sanity's sake.

So I take my sleepy mind off it. I watch a movie - noise turned up to block any arguments. I listen to too many songs and get them reverberating around the inside of my head.

That isn't going to work of course. I know it, but ignore it. Like I always do. I unwind. But something coils tighter and tighter as more and more syllables of their argument pierce through my sound shield.

A shattering stops my sound shield flat. I turn down the music.

Silence.

That has never happened before. I turn the music volume up but that just amplifies the noise.  No matter how much I want to sleep, it won't come.

That shattering could have been anything. Just an accident. I know it isn't deep down, but smother the feeling. Again.

I sob into my pillow once more, sob my way into a universe unknown to everyone except me.

You don't know that something is going on beneath your body. But you don't know. You just lie awake. You lie still as you go to sleep.

Then you lie in torment.