Under My Skin

And Then There Were None

Blood pools on the pavement and stains my clothes. It seems like it never stops, a seemingly endless flow of blood.
I scream for help at the top of my lungs, but it hardly makes a sound. The entire road smells like smoke and gasoline.

You'd be surprised how quickly blood goes cold. You expect it to run warm longer than it does. Before you know it, the last indication of their life turns cold. It's only warm for a few seconds. Before you even have time to cherish the last of the warmth from the person beside you, it goes cold.
When the spilt blood is warm on your hands, it's like they're still alive. That part of them, at least. And in a moment like that, You'll take anything you can get. But once it runs cold, reality pulls you back in an instant. The last you had of them is gone.

As the blood cools and dries, it turns to tar on your skin. Sticky and dark, you can hardly even get it off.

The sounds play over and over again, the screeching tires, the glass breaking, the steel and aluminum crunching under the pressure of another, larger car, barreling down the road at seventy miles an hour. Your own screams get trapped in your head. The whole way I ran from the house to the car, my own blood-curdling, guttural scream becomes like a broken record. I can't silence it, I can't turn it off. It just plays and plays and plays in the back of my head for years on end. Always there.  It never stops, I can sometimes hardly hear my surroundings over it

I remember every second of it. How can you forget?
Trust me, I wish I could. But nobody can.
It's bad enough during the day, constantly occupying myself with tasks and cleaning just to keep the thoughts away. At night, there's nothing you can do to fight them. Occasionally the meds I take will overrule and at least make me forget the dreams. But it always finds a way.
It always finds a way back to me.
I see my mother's face every time I close my eyes. The blood, the cuts, and ghastly bruises. I see all of it. Always.

I woke up with a desperate gasp for air, clutching my chest and drenched in sweat.
For a moment, I found myself calling out to my parents' room for help.
I've never adjusted to not having my mother there to help me through my nightmares. Half the time, I yell out for my mother. I'm desperate in the hope that one of these days I'll call for help and my mother will be there. To hold my hand, to comb her fingers through my hair, and to feel her long, manicured and painted nails against my head.

It's pathetic, for a grown man to need his mother that badly. But I can't help it. The nightmares only got worse after they passed, and suddenly, I was left to my own devices. To soothe myself in the wake of my own pavor nocturnus.
Sometimes, I'll close my eyes and caress my own hair. I'll curl up tightly in the blankets to mimic the comfort of being held. When I get too upset to properly self-soothe, I just pull at my own hair desperately trying to shift my focus to the physical discomfort of the act, as opposed to the mental anguish.

I always long for my mother's presence in those times. She always took care of me when I had nightmares, ever since I was young. It's been four years without the comfort of her presence, and somehow, I still haven't gotten used to it.

So, I laid in my bed for hours until the sun came up, spending the whole time just trying to fight off the rather graphic images that came to me.

One long cold shower later, I was awake enough to start the day.
The fear doesn't go away. But I'm able to put it on the back burner after a few hours of lingering in the anxiety.

This morning wasn't different from any of the others. The same breakfast, same routine, same clothes, cleaners, and sprays. The same television shows, the same books, the same everything.

My life is painfully repetitive. terribly dull. Safe.
But I'm pushing back. After four years, I met the grocery delivery man on the porch. Two steps off the doorframe. For most, a pathetic thing to celebrate. For me, one of the most difficult things I've done in a long time.