In a castle in the sky, memories unravel the truth.
There lies Yan, a woman who delves into her ghost-infested past, knowing it will give her the answers she seeks. What she doesn't know: if she stays in her past for too long, she may never wake up...
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Memories march in disorderly battalions when I am trapped within four walls, cowering under a blanket, cutting myself off the world's radar. Time melts.
"D-Distraction... I need to distract myself."
And that, I suppose, led me to Fantina's lair. Though, twenty-four hours have passed since then. I had taken two days to recover from whatever traumatic experience it was. No, I didn't exactly recover, but merely repressed it all. Look where it led me: hurling back into the past, unearthing it, reliving it all over again. Was the repression worth it? The pain bottles itself up unconsciously till it bursts, and I am trapped in a maelstrom of my own making.
My house—my room—is both shelter and prison. Here I am, shaken up and withdrawn, drowning in fading light. Here I am, conscious of pain and fear, my limbs gaining minds of their own, wholly disconnected from my weak will.
A click resounds somewhere. Thunderous footfalls follow. Chaos in my vision, chaos in my heart. The event that took place yesterday (my thoughts scream this fact, yet it feels so present) unfolds in splinters, my mind breaking it apart, my self breaking down.
I don't deserve this fate. Suffering over a trauma that's not my fault is way worse than guilt or regret I've experienced. Yet I'm to be blamed, too, because I had to be there at the church.
What could have occurred at one holy sanctuary to scar my already restless soul?
The fact of Hypno's recurring presence makes him so ghostly and frightening, the way he just so happens to be wherever tragedy strikes.
There are no such thing as coincidences. He's definitely involved in this. I keep repeating these statements to myself, but I can't believe them. How can I believe in myself when I paint myself the eternal victim whose warped perceptions delight in destroying me?
I wouldn't put it past the priest either. He's authority, and that is a dangerous fact, when power is often mistakenly equated with authority. It could have brought disaster to us all. So much so that I denied the existence of passersby and went after a lonely mirage.
I cough. For a while, blood spills out my lips before vanishing. My hands, my clothes, my bedsheets remain soaked, though crimson grows invisible and the metallic scent dissolves into the air.
It hurts. The whisper in my blood speaks the truth I've been avoiding all along: I have never felt this close to death in my life. I must have ducked the slash of the scythe and kept running regardless of the shadows bleeding from my heart. Regret blossoms in the forest of bulging veins and squashed arteries. Guilt caresses me. Fear takes me under its wing. And there is courage, more wayward than the image I created of it back then, hurling me into the intoxicating web of suicidal thoughts.
The clock ticks but it remains irrelevant. There is no conception of time here. I wish to rest, to open my eyes to a new reality, a new silence, no longer judgemental and hammering all that dread and blame onto me. Death is a faraway country, but my soul sips its water every second and suffers from mystical hyponatremia.
It isn't just about the past self. Even my present self is hurting psychologically from this unending episode. It's a still frame running on for eternity. I don't move, save for the shivering and the gritting of teeth. Nothing moves.
It's as though a part of me has died long ago.
I need to stop this victim mentality, to be strong for myself like any other strong, independent woman is. I need to pray for myself. But I'm forsaken everything and everyone else there's nothing and no one I can turn to, except myself. I just need to cut off all emotions and stop feeling. The pain will stop, the head will no longer throb, and the life will cease, as it should.
I should have died, too.
To wallow in self-pity as if waddling in quicksand is a horrendous affair. Not that I can do anything about it. I can't change the past. I can only rewind it, relive it and resign to it. Isn't it funny how my life is a tragedy yet a joke at the same time?
Yes, I should have died, too.
If only there's something, just some way, for me to heal, then I might just put a halt to malice aforethought. Yet I cannot become anything.
However much I struggle, it may well turn out to be the same. Maybe the next time I rewind my past, everything will be much, much better. I should consider that too, shouldn't I? A brilliant back-up plan. Finally, I'm not a disappointment.
I am a successful failure.
Isn't success something to be happy about? So why are my eyes unmoving, my mind unfettered, and my body unworthy and tainted? Why do I no more than a human husk who has forgotten what living could be? A lust for idyllic things, the perfect people, the perfect happiness, the perfect affinity, beliefs, culture, universe...
Living could be all the places where I cease to exist. If I am the problem, I just have to solve it once and for all. If the cause lies within me, it has to be worth fighting for.
Is my life worth fighting for? Grey-tinted lens viewing a world residing in the gloaming, spinning arrogantly on its heel till it brushes against a void's shoulders—a peaceful end to couple a peaceful beginning.
The whisper in my blood is silence that rushes like the gales of a thunderstorm, galloping on my broken bones and mortified humanity. It is a horseman of the apocalypse, the harbinger and the catalyst. It beckons me to tear asunder my identity and end the past's reign.
"Long live the past."
These words clog my throat till a gasp brings relief.
I can't escape the past, can I?
It will resurface in its various shapes and forms, playing the chameleon, playing the thespian.
I tilt my head. The clouds in the sky transform into my doppelgangers, gazing into my bare soul through the window.
"Are you afraid of us?" They ask.
"I'm afraid of myself," I say. "I'm afraid of the consequences."
"But what happens next is but the cause."
"Then I'm afraid of it."
"A cause can be a consequence, a consequence, a cause. It's a cycle. Vicious or virtuous, we all have to live with it."
"What if I don't want to?"
"You don't want to be alive?"
The clouds revert to their indescribable shapes. My head snaps back. I continue to cower under the sheets. My toes wriggle like a can of worms ready to be released into a morgue.
So what if I die? The next Yan will just have to go through with this motion. It isn't so difficult, after all.
Still, that would be selfish of me. Isn't being human all about being selfish, though? Then it must be alright.
People come and go. Memories, too. One day, they will all fade, and I will be the one to go.
So what?
Why can't I watch the past till the end? I'm a voyeur, the audience and not the actor. No matter how visceral it will be, I am no longer a part of it.
If the me that I currently am is the only fragment of self struggling with an existential crisis, why should I convert to the majority's view and be a ghost?
I could be different and be okay with it. I could be someone special. Isn't that desire a part of being human, too? A lesser evil, really.
So be it. I will just have to finish the little remnant of my past and be done with it. My blood curdles, but it isn't the body I reside in anyway.
