Axis

august 24th

potential trigger warning: this chapter includes a (not detailed) recounting of an experience with child molestation. if that's not something you think you can handle, you might not want to read this chapter. and yes, my heart broke while writing this. without further ado, here's the chapter i think a lot of you have been waiting for.

THE SKY SWIRLS WITH inky gray storm clouds.

I'm supposed to be getting ready to go over to Jasper's before the rain comes, but instead I sit on my windowsill, a pair of scissors hovering precariously over the soft skin of my wrist. Not poking or slicing or doing whatever it is people who relinquish their pain by cutting themselves do with scissors. Just testing, theorizing, pondering.

Is there any point?

Excluding the tip of these scissors, of course.

Despite the current turmoil state of my mind that mirrors the looming thunderstorm outside, I laugh privately at my joke.

No, I think to myself while letting the scissors clatter to the floor. I won't follow through.

But I want to.

Last night's nightmare catapulted me back to that dreaded night, the very one I wish I could forget. The one that ended everything for my dad, but was only the beginning for me.

The wind picks up outside, howling against my window with a harrowing whoosh. Yet somehow, it's like the storm is calling out to me, inviting me to come join in its misery. Without taking the time to think or feel, I pick myself up and drift down the stairs in a ghost-like trance, instinctively leading the way toward the bay, as if the water has some sort of magnetic attraction to my body.

It's not yet raining, but the sky looks like a dam ready to break through at any moment. I wander over behind our other neighbor's house, knowing they're gone for vacation and won't be able to come enquire what their crazy neighbor is doing sitting outside in the middle of a storm. I take a seat in the sand, a couple feet away from the shoreline where the water insistently drags itself away, and towards, away, and towards. My hands scoop up fistfuls of sand. I watch as the tiny particles trickle out of my grasp.

The first raindrops slowly start falling from the sky, and the wind whips my oversized T-shirt and hair around in a vigorous fury. Yet I'm completely unfazed, only capable of locking in on one distinct emotion.

The feeling. It's the terror of earthquakes making the ground tremble until foundations are broken apart. It's the rupturing panic attack of a volcano after centuries of buildup and pent up energy. It's a hurricane sobbing down on entire cities, flooding them out and washing away the ruins with its rainwater tears. It's the crushing weight of an avalanche plummeting to the ground in a pitiful heap, too broken to care about who it takes out in the process.

It's anger and hurt and resentment and fear, all squished together into a tiny ball in the crevices of your stomach, gnawing at you, pushing you, igniting you. You feel everything and you feel nothing simultaneously and yet you can't utter a single word, so you stand there watching, inhaling, absorbing, with nothing to give back even though you have everything inside of you wanting to speak, to exhale, to react.

You feel like the lone survivor of a bombing, walking through desolate streets clouded with a thick ashy smoke and haunting orange flames consuming what once was all around you. There's no one to turn to, nothing to be done to reverse the damage. Just you, alone, plagued with a crippling anxiety, left to survey the damage you've inflicted. And even if it's not your fault, you're still the one who has to look at the hideous remains, and that's a punishment enough in itself.