Care For Me Not, I'll Hurt You Too Much

The smell of it was horrid. That sour smell of whatever it was that you ate that day just suddenly coming back to you as you let the tears roll down your cheeks and into the toilet. You didn’t like that taste either. The way that the sour and rusty taste of everything you ate sliding its way acidly up your throat. The way it settled in your mouth for days and didn’t go away. The way the taste of your own vomit seemed to automatically mix in with your saliva and embed itself onto your taste buds was horrible. The way it always dangled at the edges of your lips as you tried to spit every last metallic tasting drop into the porcelain bowl you hung your head over made you wretch even more. The smell stung your nostrils and filled your brain. It made every thought running through your mind become simply vomit, vomit, vomit, puke, puke, puke. You hated it.

You hated the salty tears that stung your eyes and the way the pressure put on your face made it look puffy and red. You hated the gut wrenching feeling of your insides quickly becoming liquidized and seeping out your throat. You hated crying. You hated puking, and you hated the way it always seemed to happen all at once as the wind tried to tear down your house with you still inside.

You close your eyes and force out all the tears that they were gathering, just trying to get rid of every last stinging drop. You spit pitifully into the bowl beneath your face and feel more tears build up as a sharp, high-pitched whistle blows its way through your home eerily. You’re locked in the bathroom, gripping the seat of the toilet in your pajamas crying your eyes out and trying to stop the tangy taste of your own vomit from sliding sickeningly up your throat. You’re crying and blinking away all the tears as fast as they will come because you just want to them to stop. Every time you cry you always feel horrible, and the fact that you were vomiting your guts out and it was horribly windy didn’t make you feel any better. You try to focus on any sound but the wind. Any sound but the thousands of voices crying out in terror but lost in the breeze. You’re trying to hide from the sounds of death.

After all, that’s all you thought the wind was. It was just millions of people crying out in horror as their voices are carried away, helpless to natural forces. It was just millions of people’s final screams as they cry out in sheer agony, writhing under the painful force of their conquerors. That’s all the wind is made of. Millions of people’s last dying breath caught in a simple breeze and carried across country sides. It became so ordinary to hear so many people dying on a powerfully breezy night that many simply call it “just the wind”…just the souls of millions being trapped forever in that invisible torrent of air currents just because no one was there to acknowledge their pleas for mercy.

That’s what you hid from now. That’s what you tried to block out as the wind screamed it deathly howl throughout your house, the searching souls.

“Don’t listen to it.” You say to yourself breathlessly.

You take a deep breath to try and calm your excessive shakiness. Mistake.

You suck in the fumes of your previous digestions now collecting in the bowl. The sour-acid taste permeates itself into your mouth and deep down your throat, working its way towards your lungs with just that one breath. This makes you gag.

Your head pounds loudly, and you pray this dull throb is enough to block out the sounds of the souls screaming for your help in the wind. You listen to everything you can except the wind as the tears roll down your cheeks and drip off your chin onto the seat of the slippery surface.

You listen to the sound of your insides spilling into the bowl with loud splashes as the chunks make their deeper sounding splashes. You listen to the miniature individual drops of your own tears as they drip, drip, drip into the toilet. You hear the harsh wheezing sound your throat makes as you take quick, deep breathes while you hyperventilate against the toilet.

Vomit, vomit, vomit You gag and your eyes grow tight into your face again.

Drip, drip, drip. You cry helplessly, squinting your eyes shut.

And if that weren’t enough, your mind now decided to torment you further. The drip, drip, drip steadily begins to turn into a rip, rip, rip as you see a car’s tires careening off in all different directions as the metal is shredded apart.

Vomit, vomit, vomit You shudder involuntarily, forcing everything out.

The wind screams through your house. Its howl is transformed in your mind to your own screams as you see the body lying in front of you. Then, it turns into the screams of the many women gathered on the side of the road as you see the rest of the bodies laid down in front of you. Then, it turns back into a scream flying out of your own lungs as you cry to the ceiling, scratching your nails down the wooden paneling embedded with the pathetic, childish carving.

Vomit, vomit, vomit. But you can’t and your heart beats faster with the forced, empty retching you’re doing.

So, you collapse on the bathroom tiles, clutching your knees desperately to your chest and shuddering violently. The wind beats against your house and rips through the city, desperate to make you break and acknowledge its trapped souls. You want to sleep.

But you can’t.

The wind is too loud. You could never sleep during the storms. You couldn’t even close your eyes. The images came back then. The images of the accidents always floated through, because your family’s souls were trapped in the wind like millions of others’. They were screaming. You were screaming. They were begging, pleading for a release that you had no idea how to give them. You were begging, you were pleading for them to stop calling you to them. You were crying for them to stop coming back to torment you. You were asking them to stop wanting you to join them.

You didn’t want your soul lost forever as well.

You can feel your heart beating quickly in your chest, and feel your involuntary cold shudders as your back presses up against the tile and linoleum. You want to sleep, you want to block out any and all sound. You want to go somewhere where the wind didn’t scare you. Where it didn’t make you feel so alone. So cold. So empty.

On other nights, before, you would actually go downstairs and look for your father. Start the fight just so he could finish you. Just so you didn’t have to suffer the terrible sounds of the wind tearing through the streets and reminding you of your pain. You’ve always hated the wind. Even more than the beatings you hated the wind. It was windy the day your cousin died. It was windy the day they buried your family. Their souls are trapped like others. Their spirits come back to haunt you during the storms…and you have no solace or safe haven to go to.

Her house was gone now. Her house no longer existed. It was all His now. Gerard owned all of your precious memories, your dignity, your life, practically your soul. They were his to do with what he wanted. And right now it seemed he wanted you to suffer.

Your house was old and had many cracks. His house wasn’t and if you went into the right room or sat in the right spot, you could barely hear the wind if you hummed the perfect tune. You didn’t have to hear the lost souls in the wind, and you could pretend you could hear the angels sing instead. You had done that before when no one living was there. You had done that and found safety. You had done that and missed it.

You wanted to hear the angels sing.

You wanted to sleep the night away.

You wanted to actually be able to see the person that you were hearing in your head.

You wanted to be safe.

You shuddered again, this time pulling yourself further into a ball as you hugged your knees securely. You took a deep breath and let the last tear slip down your face as you slammed the back of your head forcefully against the side of the bath tub, feeling the pain tear through your skull as you repeated the process until….

Everything went on autopilot after that.

You no longer felt. You no longer worried. You no longer cared. You were no longer consciously in control of your actions. There was nothing more holding you back now.

Your mind hangs on by a mere thread as your body acts out the proper motions. You pull yourself up, gripping desperately onto the edge of the toilet bowl for support. You could barely feel the throb that erupted through your skull as soon as you made it into a feeble sitting position. For now, everything was numb.

With shaky hands, you push the lever on the toilet and send its contents down the pipes with a loud whoosh. You rinse your hands in the sink, and wipe your face with a cloth but never look at yourself. Looking at yourself would initiate reality again. You hear a loud pounding, but don’t care about it. You feel the dull throb more prominently in the back of your skull, but that’s good. That’s what you needed to keep the autopilot running. You needed to feel the pain. For now, this is your conscious dreaming.

You dream you go back into your room and change. You dream you grab your only sweater and step toward the door. You dream you’re heading for Gerard’s house.