Satellite Heart

When I was seventeen I truly believed that I was psychic. I believed that I was talking to the dead, and that they were whispering to me prophecies of the future and memories that had long since been forgotten. In reality, I think that I held on to the belief for the simple fact that it made me special, and that it gave me an ending other than my tainted blood lying all over the ground.

I was blinded, fooled and helplessly ignorant. Believing in your sanity was a maddened thought in itself, and every step I took towards acceptance was another I took backwards into the arms of normality. The two were like the cups of a scale, each pushing the other in the opposite direction and near impossible to equal out.

I learned something out of the whole ordeal. I would never know normality, just like I would never know whether I was truly psychic after all.

I was right about one thing, though. I predicted my death, and seven years later it rang true.



It came like a dream. It came in an eclipse of faded consciousness and hung in front of me like the threads of a nightmare, ready to be pieced together into the darkest of dreams.

At first I just stood still and stared, waiting for the images to go blurry and for me to wake up. My breathing was ragged and shallow, curling through my chest and barely reaching my mouth in time to escape. My hands were shaking at my sides, and my throat was completely dry as I forced down the splitting scream that was pushing its way out.

There was blood. It was everywhere; on my hands, on the floor, on the walls. It clung to my body like poison, making me feel dirty and disgusting and like the monster that I knew I was.

A tear dribbled down my cheek, testing the reality of my existence. It tickled my skin, falling down my chin and into the folds of my bloodied shirt. By the time it reached the ground it looked like a droplet of blood, and my eyes felt as though they had been cut into with a knife.

I was being pulled away from my body again. My soul was gripping onto the edges of my consciousness with desperate hands, but I was disappearing with a frantic scream, my chest heaving as I struggled to stay in reality.

From the corner of the room I could see everything. I could see my body, the blood and the knife in my hands. I could see the hand print on the wall, the ticking clock and the stained, shredded clothes.

“You did it.” I was in my body again and I could feel him beside me, the same devilish sneer sitting on his lips as he watched me shaking. This time I didn’t know whether he was truly a ghost, because for all I knew he had died a long time ago. “Good job, Tyler.”

Even in my darkest hour his compliment made my stomach tingle.

I screamed. I screamed and fell to the floor, my chest heaving and tears streaming down my cheeks like pools of blood. My heart had been severed and my eyes were its only release, and it was killing me for cutting it open.

The emotions were unlike anything I’d ever felt. I’d always been used to being numb, but now… I knew what it was like to be dead. Or at the very least, what it felt like to be dying. And it was more painful than the years I had spent as an insane man.

I didn’t move closer. I couldn’t. I could only cry and scream as I stared at the scene, the back of my mind registering distant screams that matched my own.

Because in the middle of the floor, in a pool of her own blood was my Angel, lying dead from my hands. I had done it. I had ruined her; I had destined her to Hell and me further into the Devil’s arms. I was nothing. I was nothing but a crazy, ruthless mind and a body that felt too strange to be mine.

”Tyler!”

It was my mum but it was too late. My fingers searched for the knife but my hands were empty, so with shaking legs I pulled my way over to the counter and picked the gun up with trembling fingers. Tears were rolling down my cheeks, the constant scream that was my mind driving me closer to the brinks of death.

”Tyler!”

A cry left my lips as I looked towards her body, before I collapsed back onto the floor with the gun.

”You have to get rid of people like that, you hear me?”

He was right, but there had been no one with a gun willing to stop me before I reached my lowest point. I had to do it myself.

Maybe in Hell I would find my Mother. Maybe she would hold me in her arms and love me again, and we could fall into bliss, clouded by each other’s madness and content with it being only us. Maybe my eternity there would be what I had always been searching for; a life without death gripping at your back and a life surrounded by people that felt the same.

That was the thing about death. You had to beat it before it beat you.

Bang. Pain erupted through me as my head lolled onto the floor, my hands uncurling around the gun and falling bloodied onto the floor.

”Tyler! Tyler, no!” Hands gripped my face, and with glazed eyes my head lolled towards the person holding me. Crystalline eyes stared back, clouded with tears and an insanity that I recognized.

My Angel.

My Angel.

I could only touch her one last time before the hands of Death tugged the last part of my damned soul away.