Loss of Control

Submerged, it seemed. Like demon fingers were pressed to his ears, his heart pounding in his chest...a muffled sound in his head, a dull thud thump. A strong heartbeat. It'd been a very bad day. Who was she, anyway? Where else did he have to go now? To whom, and what was the point - none of it mattered. Not anymore. Not now. He was so sick of the world, so immensely sick of all of it, so tired of all the pain and loss. So much pain. A world full of pain.

Disjointed, like his hands and his body had no connection to each other or to his brain. Pain and tiredness, just like an engine, just another day in the end of his life. It seemed like he'd always been living the end of his life, in his dreams, in his head. Every word she'd said to him that day, every word anybody had ever said to him in a long time - the drugs, the drinking, the smoke, and where was his father - the parties, the girls and boys crawling around in the filth and the substance like monstrosity incarnate - the smells. The lies. Coming home the long way to walk off his high, and would his mom smell it on his breath? Pointless. Pain was the engine - worthlessness, if this was all life would offer him, it wasn't enough.

Shaky, as if his motor skills had died. Maybe they were buried with the rest of his soul, with all the things that had ever mattered to him. Just a shell, and that made sense - no substance to steady himself. No control. Just an empty shell, a soul buried so deep somewhere so far away that no one would ever find it. Maybe he could. Just keep going down, and eventually he'd find it, if hell didn't come up to swallow him first. Shaky, disconnected hands, pills rattling around in the bottle. Mostly empty. He could chain them together, with all the pills in the world, make a long rope to reach straight down Satan's throat and never come back. Where had all the feeling gone, all the color? Bleak sunlight on the most brilliant days, and nothing but the cycle to greet him, nothing but the lies, the 'friends', the fake jokes and faulty smiles and empty people who thought this was what they wanted. Not what he wanted.

* * * * *

Control is relative. Pressure can kill - under pressure, molecules vibrate. They heat up with friction. They bounce around and eventually burst into freedom. Pressure dissipates, but too late, the molecules have spread out - explosion, just a simple kaboom. The substance has lost control, function, compactness.

It happens all the time, and nobody ever notices. We live under the pressure of the atmosphere - a healthy pressure, not enough to burst. We open a can of carbonated liquid, we pop the lid on a bottle of beer, we unroll the Pillsbury, pop the cylinder with a spoon. We create vacuum. Suck in air, force it out. The heart expands, blood is sucked in - the heart convulses, the blood is pushed out. Repeat. All the time - we create pressure naturally. We never notice, or care. Millions of little releases, little explosions, everyday. Delete the mass filling a space, and the vacuum created forces something else to fill its place.

* * * * *

Yeah, that would work. Even if he never woke up, never heard the alarm - and he would set the alarm - someone else would fill the space. Fill the need. If he never woke up and that created a vacuum - that would be the proof that he was important. Never come back. Never look back. Was he so important that this was what it would take?

A normal night - silence at dinner, silent just like he'd always been silent, secretly silent, spitting out words with nothing behind them. Just sounds, syllables. The post-eating workout was always a calming affair. Steadiness, that was what he needed. The burn in his muscles, the ache in his bones - this was all he ever felt anymore. Just the burn of lactic acid. But it wasn't enough to satiate his thirst. Nothing was ever enough, and that was the fatal flaw - he took up too much space. He thirsted too much, couldn't be healthy for the environment.

Quiet midnight. Alarm set for five o'clock AM, just like always. Book bag packed, the notes written. The homework done. Outfit picked out, boxers and socks for now - down the stairs, quietly. Silently, just like always. Over to the cabinet to the left of the hole where the microwave should have been - he paused to contemplate the gap. He leaned on the counter, braced with his arms, letting the pain warm up to him, letting the engine go full-throttle - rope weaving, no easy task. He'd need plenty of energy, an inner generator. Let the engine get hot. Let the tears come. Shaky again, exhaustion dimming his brain. Poorly drawn breaths.

One bottle, one capsule. Rattling ever more as the moments went by - no rattle, next bottle. Too many rattles, silence them all, don't wake the family, one by one. Two by two. More and more, handfuls at a time.

Collapse.

Such a strong heartbeat, nothing but a quiet thud thump. Nothing but the darkness closing his eyes, the weakness in his limbs, the vomit in his stomach. Blood in his veins, still and cold in the dark, somehow collapsed on his bed all alone. Just like always.

* * * * *

Loss. Maintenance of the self is a hard thing to do with loss to consider - feelings of isolation consume, feelings of grief. People often react with inwardly directed blame, as if it was all their fault; or with guilt, as if they'd never done enough. Grief is a strange thing, evoking a loss of logical, rational thought, and empowering an individual to feel more logical than anyone else. Grief can make a soul lie to itself. Such pain - pain being defined here as that sinking feeling in your chest, the ghosts in your brain - can drive a soul to enormous depths.

Everyday, people experience loss. A loss of oxygen, briefly, until they breathe in; a loss of sight until they open their eyes. But these losses aren't enough to cause damage, rather, they're refreshing. Still, we loose each day - we loose contact every time we say good bye, we loose time to live with every moment. Some are more sensitive to these losses than others - some will notice them, most won't.

For those who notice, it's a scary world. It's a place full of all the creepy crawlies in their nightmares. Paranoia is born of such oversensitivity - more than enough noticing than has ever been needed to survive, strictly speaking. So much so, that it can become imagined fear - imagined loss. Invisible, unreal hurts and haunts. Ghosts and ghouls. Fake. False. Falsehoods build up within such people - and these weigh enough to create incredible amounts of pressure.

* * * * *

A scream from somewhere far away. A howling voice, loud tears announcing themselves, smoothly sticky hands working his spine, picking him up and laying him down; rattling noises again. Reach for the pills, automatic, autopilot having become the lifesource long ago. Far too long ago. Only the darkness weighing in, so heavy, so numb. Even less feeling, bile in his throat. Failure to reach them, something firm grasping the ghost of his hand, a yank, a burst. In the silence, there wasn't even a heartbeat. So much quiet, so much peace. Where was hell? His soul had never deserved this silence.

A shout. Worried? A worried shout?

No. Awareness - where had that come from? Since when had awareness existed in such silence? Another voice. A steady thrum. A dull ache somewhere deep inside, fire in his veins - eyes wide open - heartbeat shoots to life - feeling, awareness - gasp for air, sweet air, just one last breath.

With eyes wide open, heart laid bare, the numbness burned off and the illness kicked in. Long weeks of shots, long weeks of stares. Blood being taken away. Analyzed. Vomit at first, every time there was a movement to make - silence died off, the steady beep of the machine. Machines, more than humans, working round the clock to prove to himself that here was life, audible for your ears. That strong heartbeat, right here, more than just a dull thud thump. Dynamic - the burst of every vacuum.

* * * * *

Explosions can happen in the silence. We don't hear every breath, or every heartbeat. We don't pay attention to the soft hiss of a can, the brief pop of a tube, the sizzling of a two-liter. But they happen just the same - instantaneous losses of control, and no matter how tiny, they're vital to life - millions of life changing events occur every day in our lives. But nobody ever notices, because they can be quiet, unnoticeable. No warning, no shame.