A chrysalis of filmy gauze swallowed my eyes. I gazed into the tinted darkness, memories of a pounding metronome????my heart, I think????echoed in a far-off land of stale moments. I lay splattered like a broken egg in an asphalt skillet, limbs curled in jagged spirals and insides scrambled into mush. The ground was wet with what I knew to be my blood, but I couldn’t feel a thing. It had only just occurred to me that I should have been writhing in pain, that my soul should have been clawing itself to a world beyond, but not so much as a tickling sensation befell my decaying corpse.
I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. But the stars must have been magnetic and my bones steel; the great current raised me to my feet. I was in a ghost town, the streetlamps flickered without the accompaniment of human activity. Parked and running cars burned gasoline, and the laundromat loudspeakers moaned ballads of lonesome heartbreaks, but the only head to pollute with fumes and longing was mine.
I was alone. Why was I alone? Though my movie screen projected this live film in shades of decay, I knew that the night was perfectly noir????ominous and beautiful. So why was I the only one there to enjoy it? Was it that the atmospheric melancholy was too cold and suffocating? Was it that I was the only one willing to embrace the inevitability of losing my sense of self, my anchorage to earth, in a maze of curious doubt as I gave myself to the moon’s luster? Or maybe...maybe the detraction was me? I felt dead, or at least like I was supposed to be dead, but my awareness still wore the chains of mortality. Maybe I looked dead, too?
But that’s hardly fair, is it? So maybe there was something wrong with me? It doesn’t make me a monster. I refuse to believe that people are so shallow, that the existence of anything different from what they know would be met with such cruel panic! Only, the question remains, why was everyone gone? Maybe there was something here, other than myself, that was frightening and gruesome enough to jeopardize the systematic humdrum of life? Could it be that I was a victim of this circumstance, and that nothing could have been done to help me? No, that can’t be right. I may be in bloody tatters, I may feel like I was turned inside-out, then outside-in again, but I’m still here. Surely they knew that I was still breathing when I was unconscious? Couldn’t they have taken my broken but functioning body with them, wherever they went?
There is no question, I must have been purposefully isolated. Do you know what that feels like? Can you understand the subtle extremity of this curse? It’s as if I’m in a box. The walls are invisible, virtually non-existent, but I am the only one here. I’m quite sure that if there were anybody else around, we would certainly be aware of each other, but only as mirages. Why, we could even talk to each other, but it wouldn’t be a real conversation. There wouldn’t be any substance, nothing would sink in. That’s because of the invisible walls; they would separate us into two different dimensions, of a sort. People outside of the box exist in a reality of connectivity, of relatability, of understanding. It’s a world of warmth and reactions. But the box, oh the box, is a reality of icy solitarity. It’s the part of the universe that the electric field of sociality does not touch, where it cannot touch. Such electricity does not flow through me or this dimension. This must be why I was left alone, they could sense my inability to conduct their precious energy...but, I still long to.
Can I not learn to be like them? Couldn’t someone be my saving light and brighten the way that leads out of this suppressive box?! I started to crave people with a mad hunger. A faint dizziness rolled about in my skull, and I doubled over as sharp-toothed pangs of emptiness gnawed at my stomach. The box was going to starve me if I didn’t get out of it. Clutching my midsection, I hobbled down the dark, deserted road, not leading myself so much as the desperation of the hunger was. My vision had steadily worsened since I woke up on my back and alone, so the most I could do was scan for human silhouettes through a screen of black, dancing flames. Somewhere far off, I heard a deep moaning, and the hunger steered me in the direction of the beautiful noise. A few seconds later, I found myself flat on the ground again. A brick wall smeared with blood stood in front of me, and I sputtered tooth fragments. That hypnotic moan grew louder, but this time I was sane enough to know it was the noise of my own loneliness.
I didn’t bother to move after that. I was a lost cause. What was the point of trying to escape the box if I couldn’t even help myself? Why shouldn’t my strings just be cut now? I grasped a broken tooth with a sharpened edge. It was small, but my will to exist was a fraction of it’s size. For hours, it seemed, I dragged the tooth across my wrists, hoping to let my veins bleed their last. Oh they eventually bled; my arms were cloaked in the red, hot liquid in a matter of minutes. My eyelids never fluttered, though. As the fingers of dawn pushed the moon into the disappearing sea of stars, and the faint rays of a sleepy sun grazed the empty sky, my consciousness failed to waver. Maybe I really was dead. Maybe I was in hell.
So entrenched was I in the theoretical hell, that I almost didn’t notice the deep, shaky heaving from the other end of the wall. Fairly sure that it couldn’t be me again????I had quit the habit of breathing a millennium ago???? I twisted my neck the few inches that it could to catch a glimpse of the figure. I could only see his bodily outline through the haze, but I heard his running heart and smelled his sweat-bastioned skin with ungodly clarity. The hunger pangs shot through me like bullets, their most vicious attack yet.
I’m not sure what happened after that. My memories seem more like wild distortions than anything else. And they’re only broken glimpses of the whole ordeal, so that makes them even less reliable. But I remember what my bones did????it was like they realigned themselves. You would’ve thought that I had a spider’s skeleton. Then one thing led to another, and I was on top of him. I must have leaped onto his back in a state of deranged excitement. I was just so happy to get out of the box that I think I started to claw at his flesh and gnaw his head, like a dog with a chew-toy. He might have struggled or tried to scream, but I’m not entirely sure. It got fuzzy again after that, but I know that I ended up with bits of brain and assorted scraps of skin in between what was left of my teeth. It was like ecstasy to me????the way my eyes rolled back, the warmth that surged through my empty veins, the experience of finally being close to someone. It was all I ever wanted, really.
Make no mistake, I’ll do anything it takes to stay out of the box.
Anything at all.