Despite all that we had tried, everything we had attempted, we lost. As I sit here, my thoughts turning inwards, the bathroom floor is growing warm. Perhaps even comfortable.
The empty medication bottle in front of me reminds me what I'm doing here. It's a little orange trench, emptied of its troops. They made one last brave charge, but they couldn't take any ground against this beast. This raging voice in my head. It started a few months ago. Unbidden whisperings. Uncontrollably violent urges. The doctors said it was a severe case of schizophrenia. That I was developing a second personality that was cutting me off from reality. They sold me up the creek, a lost cause.
This voice, this... interminable, bloodthirsty being, is not me. It's not who I am. It finds no root in my history or my thoughts, and yet it's still there. An ancient and violent god, trapped within the stubborn confines of a mortal's mind. A mind that's quickly crumbling.
I remember reading Jung. Reading the theories about our collective unconscious. This... thing could perhaps be a construct from such collective empathy. Not everything humanity has accumulated has been good, but even as I ponder it, the voice rages. Men. Women. Children. Villages. Cities. Countries. WORLDS. All fell to its indomitable rage, it's endless thirst for innocent blood.
All fell, except one. Whatever this thing is, it cries to be released, but I will hold, until there is nothing left of me. It can claim a thousand lives, but it will not have this one. I can't see out of one eye now. I don't know whether it's my head or the pills working. The voice is dulling slightly now. Maybe I was just crazy after all. Maybe.
But even now... so many pills, and the voice is still there. Reality is still here, pressing against my aching ribs. These... tears running down my face. God above, I'm afraid. Perhaps not of death, but of defeat. What horrors will this thing unleash, while I look on from behind my own eyes, terrified and helpless? Whose faces will swim through the red haze towards me, only to be grasped and broken?
Both my eyes are dark now. The voice seems subdued but yet still clear. Images now. I see images. Worlds engulfed with flames. Worlds upon worlds. Mountains of dead. Heaps of flesh and rivers of blood. By the rivers of hell, what is this thing that I harbour?
My arms and legs are going numb. Maybe this is death's embrace. Maybe this will be my victory of this monster. My end, and his eternal prison within a rotting corpse. Maybe...
Days pass. Weeks even. I'm dreaming now. Or perhaps remembering. A sweet kiss. A child. My child. I had a family. I had a life. Had.
I can feel my hands and my toes wiggle gingerly. I'm alive. I think. But something feels strange. I look about myself. Hospital attire. Fit for the dead. Hands and feet, twenty fingers and toes. A wretched itch on the back of my scalp. Reaching to scratch it, I pause. Stitches. The ragged feeling of not-yet-mended bone. The off-balance feeling of missing a piece of brain.
A doctor paces into the lab, and looks down at me languidly. No bed side manners. Not even a conversation.
"Tumour," he says nonchalantly.
I smile and nod, and turn over and go back to sleep.
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