25 August 2012
@Hermione28
The clock struck one.
All around you, the shadows stirred. The walls moved. You knew you weren't alone. You could feel it. Sense it. Smell it in the air. The rank smell of the fear you exposed. That nerve-tearing, bone-chilling fear that had you in a corner with your arms around yourself as you told yourself over and over again that it wasn't true. You didn't want to think about it. You didn't want to accept the fact that there was something here, in this room, beside yourself.
A wall hisses. You cringe, the sound echoing in your head, clawing at the exposed ends of your raw nerves. The white walls didn't look as white anymore.
Your mind plays trick on you. Noises. Figures in the dark. You're not aware of what's real, what is your own imagination betraying you.
Something whispers to you right. You flinch, your heart pounding. You can feel your head spinning, the sound scratching at the back of your brain. You're exhausted; you haven't slept in days, kept awake by the sounds. The whispers. The gushing voices that whisper insane things to you.
You can't escape them. They're inside your head, and you feel like they'll tear you apart. But what are they? You're aware of it, in a distant way, as it flickers on and off in your subconscious.
As you lose your mind.
You grasp your head.
Make it stop.
Something laughs.
Something stirs.
Make it stop. Make it stop.
Then something whispers your name. You whimper, holding your legs closer to you, as if they'll protect you from the voices. You bury your head between them. Good lord, just make it stop. "MAKE IT STOP!"
Silence. That eerie silence fills the room. No voices. No rustling. Nothing. Nothing but a heavy silence hanging around you. Tense. Expectant.
A silence that threatens to drive you mad.
Seconds go by that feel like centuries, and you sit there. Waiting. Heart pounding. Head whirling. Desperately clinging on to the last shards of your sanity. Time passes slowly and you can't take it anymore. You'll lose it.
"SHOW YOURSELF!" you holler, spitting obscenities at your silent invader. "TORMENT ME NO LONGER!"
And so, frightfully obedient, she appears. Like a burning flame. Wavering, shimmering under the light. Heart-stopping. Brain-teasing. Beautifully surreal.
You feel your exhaustion vanish and your fear give way to an awed admiration for this beautiful creature that lies before you. Her hair, as black and untamed as night, flows down the sides of her face, framing her fragile features. She wears nothing but a frail veil that could be made of the haze of a man, the vaporous cloth doing nothing to hide the generous curves which lie underneath it. Her lips, a luscious, toxic red color, are slightly parted, frozen in the middle of a time-less sigh. Porcelain skin covers her body, and you're afraid to breathe, to move, for the fear she might shatter at the noise. She was indisputably perfect. Purely, poisonously perfect.
It seems like time has slowed. And all you can do is stay there, frozen. Completely bewitched by her spell. From your mind slip away every sore in your body, every pain. Every problem or complaint, they seem suddenly unimportant. Seconds tick by. You can feel nothing, nothing but the beating of your own heart accelerate as she takes a long, gracious step towards you.
Her body moves gracefully, with the feline ferocity of a stalking tigress as she moves about her prey. And yet, there is a certain liquidity to her movements as she moves across the floor, snaking her way towards you with deathly precision in every step.
And that's when you know. You know. It's so frightfully simple.
This woman was Death. And she'd come to take you away.
And, suddenly you realize you don't care anymore. In fact, you embrace death as a friend. Death could stop the noises. Death, this beautifully frail, intoxicating creature, had come to take you away. Death had come to bring you peace. And Satan knew peace was something you yearned for.
But as you sit there in a corner, decision in mind, waiting for the fate to come, you notice something odd about the spiritous lady walking towards you. With each step she seems to grow shorter, stubbier, somewhat... graceless. Her voluptuous curves disappear to horrible pointed hip bones and the luscious color vanishes from her lips. Her hair, once flowing, dulls matte and limp, chunks missing in places as if ripped out. Her skin, once fair and elegant, now looks pale and sickly bruised. Dirty. Her eyes grow tired and savage, and all color vanishes from her cheeks until you're staring at a skeletal child of filthy complexion and withered air.
At first you don't react; it takes your mind a second to register the scene, and then slowly, gradually, you feel fear creep back into you, wrapping itself around your lungs and choking you, your dreamlike daze shattering into crude reality in one cruel, stabbing blow. A shiver runs down your spine.
You feel your head spin. Your heart hammer. You feel the stinging of the cuts in your skin where you've hurt yourself. It all comes back, painfully real, extracting a whimper from you.
Which she responds with a gag. A horrible sound best described as a sob choked on a moan. Like the rusty hinges of he doors to a slaughter house.
Her head moves to one side, as if regarding you.
The silence falls heavily.
Thu-thump. Thu-thump.
"AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!" she shrieks, driving you against the wall, a heart attack near on its way, as she begins tearing out the hair on her head with a horrible ripping sound that seems to precede the agonized wail of a thousand burning men in hell. You can hear another voice, off-pitched and held in an ear-splitting scream, perhaps it's you, at the sight of her bleeding head and torn-out hair, which lays forgotten on the floor, the excruciating sight tearing at the very seams of your sanity.
And then everything seems to happen in slow motion. It's like a wire disconnected, like a gasket had been blown, and with it your fatigue, your worries, and what once seemed to hold you here doesn't matter anymore; in fact, nothing matters anymore as you float away, clear-headed, light-hearted and full of the blazing energy of a care-free child in a world with no pain. You see, distantly, as a group of men barge through the padded white walls and grasp the screaming girl whose eyes have not left you, holding the same needles that kept you sound for so many years, a prisoner of your own sanity, slave to your imagination.
You see a light, so beautiful, so pure, on the far side of this horrible room full of pain, of screaming and agony, inviting you in, away from this horrible world of mad reason and illogical sanity. You don't have to think twice about it.
And as you drift away, slowly, gradually being engulfed by the light, one last, wavering thought dawns you.
Looking down at the girl below, so lost, so frail and so beautiful in her own way, you realize that, thought different circumstances, you've both been haunted by the same spectrum.
Every day, day by day since the day we were born, shaped and molded to society's ways and customs, never being allowed to be heard, to express the true capability and imagination that lie underneath a man's suit and tie, held in restrain by the rules and forms Whig have all been stuffed into one significant, tiny word.
Sanity.
Because in a mad world, only those who are mad are sane.
And suddenly, in the last, lingering shards of a thought, you find yourself wishing that someday, perhaps that little girl, so intoxicatingly pure on the inside, rotten and spoiled in so many ways on the outside, can tear through the seams of her own prison of mind. Even if, like you, it means death.
And float towards her own light.
Torn At The Seams • Opuss № I