Devils and Angels

xix. rising panic and empty promises

c l a i r   d e   l u n e

moonlight

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BRUTAL, ARCTIC WINDS BUFFETED MY body, but my desire for masochism devoured all else, including my pulsating will to surrender to the hopeless warmth, that could have been just blankets away, until I had tore down to the forest in the dead of night.

December brought blackness early, and hung it with impatience across an ink-stained sky. Briefly, I wondered how I looked, a five-foot girl crushed between her own frozen limbs, caught beneath the austere moonlight spilling from the sky.

I shook my head from the thought, the distraction of which clinging to my mind with claws I wanted to rip from my brain. My focus was only on the icy quality to my lips, and the stiffness of my cheeks, and the ice like scattered diamonds beneath my eyes, forever imprinting where my tears had once been and forcing them to glimmer with a lightness I couldn't begin to feel.

My throat was tight, swollen and claustrophobic from the pressure surging from my clamped lips and stubborn pride. Through my bleary, salt-washed eyes, everything was a mesmerising blur of forgettance; it was no longer night, no longer dark, no longer December, no longer me running from my problems.

And when I swiped the tears away with a knife for a hand, all of the above were true, and―fuck, it was dark.

This time, it swallowed me, in a turbulent nightmare of the hollowness of my shaking palm; empty without his traitorous one engulfing it.

The shivering spread through my wrists and coursed across my body in a flash-flood of fire and ice; a surge so breathless that my chest tightened with asphyxiation. My heart thundered in my chest, in my ears, and I embraced the hammering only to steel myself from the chills carving patterns down my spine.

I fell to my side, gasping as the jolts of paralysis traipsed up and down my skin and left me vulnerable to the control slipping through my slackened fingers, quivering with the sheer gravity of keeping them aloft, instead of limp fists in the earth.

Fevered flushes crushed my insides, blazing the desperate sobs that choked out numbers, and every thought in my mind that was an affirmation to be okay, because if I could think my way into this state, then I could think my way out of it, and―,

I curled my fingers, digging them into the frozen ground beneath me. The muscles in my arm tensed; my shoulder rose to the curve of my neck. With each infinitesimal movement, the panic began to work its way through my body, until my insides no longer felt so ruptured and devoured by my body's sheer masochism.

The rises and falls of my chest with each breath were leaden and forced; each swirl of my breath formed a cloud of white smoke against the navy background.

With the effects of the attack no longer gripping my body, the vigour of my previous thoughts had fallen away, leaving me exposed to everything that tormented me―made me feel hopeless and weak and shattered.

My instincts to flee from the cold returned to my blanched, chilled body, and I forced myself from the ground on frozen palms and frost-glazed limbs. Razor-sharp cold dug into my legs as my feet pounded across the hard-packed earth, the adrenaline thawing my nerves and causing them to explode with mind-shattering pain.

Eight o'clock wrapped around my fingers like a ghostly shroud, and as I staggered past the block of flats, my teeth sunk into my bottom lip and my eyes cast upon one window that seemed to emblazon itself into my eyelids.

The guilt of an empty promise hung in the air, then pooled in the pit of my stomach in acidic rivulets.

On one of out long walks home, his hand had latched onto mine and he'd forced me to stop in my tracks, a concerned pull to his eyebrows. When I'd questioned him, increasing worry growing in my insides, he made me promise that I'd tell him when I had a panic attack. Because not enough people know, and I want you to trust me, and I'm your friend, and in response, I'd slid my fingers through his,