☠Milo Periander☠
☠TRIGGER WARNING: MENTION OF SUICIDAL THOUGHTS☠
Milo Periander knows darkness like it's a drink. Like shadows are thirst and silhouettes are hunger. He knows death like it's the hardness of whiskey, bare and raw with such smoky scotch burning the throat. He breathes sorrow like it's a stale air, the atmosphere as heavy as his third, his fifth, his uncountable beer knocked back. Swallowing, with all the hopes of everything just going away. He knows blackness because it's the only thing he's ever loved.
He didn't mind it when he died. It was the darkest time of his life, and he'd been able to wade in and out without having to see anything. When he was drunk- so plastered he could forget today and tomorrow existed one after the other- he always had to wake up. So when he died, he was quite okay with never having to wake up again. He didn't miss sunlight. He didn't miss breathing. He never missed being alive.
And he was certain nobody missed him, either.
Underneath the glimmering blanket of rocks and stars, he blinks until his eyes can't open any longer. Perhaps exhaustion tugs at his skin, an aroma of sleep wafting through the air set alight. Gold flecks line his vision and along the walls- all that does, to a man once enamored by a selfish prince, is make Milo fall in love, deeper and deeper, at last with something other than the abyss.
Hell, they say, is a landscape that burns. Its fire may be weak, may be loud; it might set ablaze in an instant or slowly linger from embers over a millennia of minutes that feel like hours. It's something like eternity, although forever is an impossible thing to define. It's quite like infinity, but Milo has never felt infinite.
He thinks he walks through hell every day. In the mornings, he awakes to his fourth alarm (you don't hear bells- the ringing is all in your head), and shakes off a headache, a hangover, a hunger. He dresses in jeans and plain shirts because nothing about him is exciting, and he leaves with oils on his face and grease in the hair. Clean is not a sensation he knows. Milo has never been clean.
On the road, he's quick. Anger seethes through him if the streets move too sluggishly, his hands gripped on the wheel until pale and flushed like the sweat and brine on his cheeks. Somedays his windows are rolled down and the wind hits his face like a fan, reminding him of how fast the world is, how vast the sky can be. But when he parks, the window rolls up, and it feels, once more, like he's choking. And drawing a deep breath feels impossible. It feels eternal.
He shuts his eyes before opening the door. It's the only part of the day when sunlight doesn't touch him, trapped in the driver's seat, staring at nothing. It's his warmest seconds, the one moment he's most distant from hell.
But then he gets out. He enters the white building with windows no one thinks to look into as they drive past. Yet all he wonders about is who's watching him walk inside, who knows he's checking himself in, and who knows the building is not an office, but a facility for the dependent. Of all there is in existence, Milo most hates being dependent.
Formally, it's a hospital. His mother calls it a mental institution. He's been here long enough that the receptionists know his name, but he can't look them in the eyes; they know too much about what he's done. After a while, they'd granted him "special permissions," so now he's allowed to sleep alone at home, rather than alone here. He's allowed to wake up elsewhere, when really he wants to not wake up at all.
At least, at home, no one has to hear his nightmares. They don't have to watch him relive the night he hit a man with his car, so drunk he kept going without thinking twice. Perhaps he thought it was a speed bump, or maybe he was so inebriated that he wasn't thinking at all.
