Weak and Powerless

The abandonment was itching at my throat, a simple little inside scratch I couldn’t reach. I had to resist sticking my fingers down my throat to make that horrible itch go away. But this loneliness was hard to shake off, especially now since it was branded in my skin bone deep. Terror was finding a way to slide without much trouble into my ocean gray eyes, to widen them and create an absence of knowing.

Was what I was seeing real? Was all of this just a figment of my sub-reality conscious that had found a hole to get through up to the surface?

I couldn’t answer questions I didn’t know, so I allowed the scene unfold before me like a pop out book, amazing me but the terror was still there. I wasn’t aware and I certainly had no control to rewind, fast-forward, or pause to catch my breath. And before I knew it, I had gotten myself chin deep into trouble that I didn’t think would be ridden away with by my lazy tantrum.

Where I stood in the spectrum between there and here was rather puzzling, because not was I there, nor was I here just simple in the presence of it all and basking in what I could not change. Soon I was there, remembering like most would and letting that itching absence of being in me take control. I was totally and irreversibly damaged and vulnerable as the effect for my lack of ability to suffer. I laid there waiting for the eggshell of vulnerability and other such feelings to pass but to no avail, I lost the fight.

I had once been safe from pain and the hurting of truth, so once I thought, that ignorance was the key to true survival. But that puts me at a disadvantage to believe such a silly burnish for what my parents, friends, and the government didn’t want me to know. So here I was again with that stomach-empty loneliness that was still masked behind the itch in my throat.

I could taste it in the air, a stale iron like taste that clung to my tongue and the back of my throat like hot mist would to your skin after a very hot shower. I felt it there, and I was breathing it in with each inhale, pushing it away from me with every exhale. It seemed inevitable to keep the feeling of desperation from covering me, and I coveted tranquility beneath my skin. I could not find that, no matter how hard I tried to succeed, my mind was too weak to push away the thoughts.

Wondering why I was here, I stood from where I laid naked, the sheet slipping from my bodice down my hips, past my knees and finally to the floor where it puddle beneath me like a silky river of pale blue. The room was a bitter cold, winter seeping through the cracks in the old shack walls, where I knew the draft I could feel was coming from.

Not another living soul existed where I was present; I heard no footsteps push down against the floorboards. I heard no breath and no heartbeat, and I could see no flesh besides my own in the mirror across the room.

Hair that twisted and twirled down my back to my waist, but refused to puddle like the sheet had below me, and the eyes of ocean gray. I felt adamant to understand why I felt like I wasn’t in my own body, that this wasn’t who I really was and to be completely at peace I had somewhere else to be. The host my soul was residing in seemed foreign to me, my movements prove of that as I tried to steady myself to a slow pace. I wanted to take in everything, from the graying, dusty, and ripping wallpaper that threatened to fall from the wall as the glue it was attached to faded with age.

I felt my own skin tear away as the wallpaper fell from the wall, revealing more wood that refused to conjoin with it’s partners to keep the draft from flowing, and I revealed only flesh that was hot and burning. There was no pain to feel as I watched my skin become a lake beneath me, and my toes were swimming through it as if they were reaching to an unknown destination, finding it nowhere to be found.

I looked in the mirror once more to catch the glimpse of what I thought to be a monster, now I still looked as if my skin was not falling, despite the lake of flesh beneath me. The wallpaper had torn away as well, yet some still clung for dear life, leaving me absolutely puzzled to the show in the mirror and the way those pieces of sticky paper seemed single-minded to keep its place.

There was no color as the light began to fade from the window, leaving a curtain of darkness in the room as my skin still continued to die away. I could hear my flesh sizzle as the darkness attached itself to me, burning away to reveal the hollow bones to my skeleton. Was this a dream?