Misguided Ghosts

Chapter Twelve

Twelve – Ed

I couldn’t sleep, so I drank.

As I stood in the kitchen, knocking back my second (or was it my third?) mouthful of whiskey, straight from the bottle, Rodent jumped up on the side. She looked at me and meowed, almost disapprovingly.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told her.

I kept waiting for the intoxication to hit me, so then maybe I couldn’t think. So then I could pass out and have a dreamless sleep.

Despite the clarity of my thoughts, I was certainly unable to walk in a straight line. I fumbled my way from the kitchen to the living room and collapsed on the sofa that Tay and I had curled up on only a day earlier. The day. The day I lost every form of emotion. Not even Tay’s father angered me anymore. I wanted to be able to feel again, even if it was the pain of losing my soul. But I wasn’t going to give Tay up just because I was a selfish bastard.

I picked up the TV remote and began to channel flick, searching for anything insipid to dull my thoughts. I ended up watching Teen Mom on Viva, which was just a piece of piss programme on a piece of piss channel. A sudden wave of anger swept through me and I felt like storming back over to Tay’s house and punching her father in the face. Without even realising what I was doing, I was on a rampage.

When I blinked again, I was standing in my bedroom, the smashed bottle of whiskey dripping onto the floor and staining the carpet. I’d pulled some of the posters off my walls and a torn pillow – Tay’s pillow - resided in the corner of my room, the stuffing spilling onto the floor.  A photo frame lay smashed underneath my foot. It was a photo of Tay and I on the night we had gone to see Blink-182. Tay’s eyes shone with excitement and her face was flushed slightly, her straight hair falling perfectly and shining from the light of the flash of the camera. I stood at her side, my chin resting on her shoulder, grinning cheekily at the camera that she held above her. We both looked slightly sweaty, but most of all, we looked alive. I removed my foot from the edge of the photo frame, hearing glass crunch under my sock. I rescued the photo from the destruction that I had unknowingly caused and placed it safely on the top of my wardrobe.

I walked through the rest of the flat, surveying the damage. A trail of chaos marked my journey from the living room and kitchen, into the hallway and into my room. The sofa cushions were strewn across the living room, while the TV was still blaring Teen Mom. The coffee table had been flipped and the medical papers that had adorned it were scattered across the floor. My days-old coffee mug lay smashed underneath the edge of the table. Everything had been swept off the sides in the kitchen, making the floor a stainless steel death-trap. Rodent’s food and water bowls had been upturned, the water mixing with her food, congealing in a gloopy mass on the floor. The hallway was the least damaged area of the flat, with only a few pieces of cutlery lying on the floor. The bathroom remained untouched. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of mess I could have made in there.

Rodent nervously came out from behind the toilet and tentatively approached me. I held my hand out to her and she nuzzled her face into it after taking some apprehensive sniffs. She jumped up into my arms and I cradled her gently.

“What happened to me, Rodent?” I asked softly, kissing the top of her head before carrying her into the kitchen.

I set her down on the side while I began to clean up the mess that had been her food. Once I had refilled the respective bowls, she dug in eagerly while I absentmindedly stroked the back of her head.

Think, I told myself. If you’re not capable of emotion, then what happened?

The answer came to me easily. Caleb. He had my soul, the centre of emotion. Somehow, he’d figured out how to control my soul and therefore me, intensifying the emotions that should have been building inside me since that morning, when Tay and I discovered the plane tickets. So why had he done it? To let me know who was boss. Who was in control. If I did one thing that he didn’t like, or anything that he didn’t want me doing, then he could simply… I didn’t even want to finish that thought. If I went on another rage near anyone, I could kill them. What if he made me do something like that near Tay? I couldn’t kill her. If I killed her, then I’d kill a large part of myself in the process. As I had told Caleb, I was nothing without her.