Every day, there are moments when things feel fine. When my breakfast has the perfect milk-to-cereal ratio, when I get injured and the pain grounds me, when the sun catches just right in her hair. After my first kiss in sixth grade, I spent a week convinced that I was perfectly healthy.
It’s the tapping that convinces me, now, that my life is never going to be sane. The hallucinations don’t mean anything; I’m perfectly aware that they aren’t real. They keep changing, anyway, which makes it hard for me to take them seriously. When I was little they took the form of shapeless menaces in my closet, under my bed. As always, they mutated once I got used to them and started calling the thing in my closet Bob. Right now, they take the form of fingers, long and dark, that reach out of every corner and curl around door frames. The tapping, though, I’m pretty sure even my brain isn’t broken enough to deal with that. On good days, it’s quiet. Just a little click every hour or so, a nail against concrete. On bad days, every surface pounds like a heartbeat and my foundations shake themselves apart. But it never stops.
Today is a very bad day. I sit on the couch in my pajamas, with her next to me. More than anything else, she has always persuaded me to believe in life, because she is so unexpected. We are sitting on the couch in our pajamas and I expect her to put Netflix on, but instead she goes to bake chocolate-orange cookies.
The tapping gets louder when she is gone. The lamp on the table beside me flickers. The dark fingers that I mostly ignore scrabble at the walls and try to peel them like an onion. The lamp flickers again and then dies, and it is a revelation, because how could I ever think that I deserve to exist?
The things are crawling on the walls. The fingers are prodding my sides. The tapping is all I can hear and I can see the shadows of leviathans through a world that suddenly seems too transparent.
“Hey, what’s going on,” she hisses in my ear, her calluses dragging across my cheek like fireworks. My skin is too tight and I want to twist into a snake so I can shed it. I scream at her for lighting up my scales with the burning that is her touch. The sounds die in my stomach acid.
I am at school. I am at home. I am at the supermarket. I am dying in a hospital bed with IVs digging into my skin. I am formless and unconnected.
No, I am at home. It was the lamp. I remember the lamp. The lamp started it, the lamp made her drag her calluses across my cheek like fireworks. It needed a new lightbulb. It flickered like a dying sun. And I wonder, do dying suns flicker, or just explode like a tomato flung against pavement? Would I see my death coming, if the sun burst like a tomato on a hot day? I don’t know, and my bones are buzzing and I am on the floor with the carpet digging into my knees. The tapping is tearing everything apart and I can feel the things beyond staring at me.
“The carpet is digging into my knees,” I tell her.
“I know. You’re going to be okay,” she says sadly, she hisses sharply, I can’t dig apart the intricacies in her voice. “Oh, god, please, where’s the damn ambulance?”
I see my elbows above my wrists above my knuckles, all wrapped around me like snakeskin. I see the shine of her wedding ring. I see dust in the air, I see a blue mug, I see the hair on her legs. I see the lamp and suns die behind my eyelids.
I can feel the reverberations of the tapping in my chest.
There are fingers crawling out of her mouth and settling on her skin.
“Stay with me please, come on, tell me how you feel.”
I feel her calluses. I feel the carpet, the heat everywhere because our air conditioner is broken, the harsh beating of my heart in my chest.
“Good job,” she says. “Keep talking. What else is in here?”
The air conditioner failing to turn on. A scratching in the wall that might be a rat, we need to take care of that. The memory of her voice as she whispers her vows to me, intimate despite our families around us.
The cookies burning in the oven because she abandoned them. I put on perfume this morning, when I thought it was going to be a good day.
The creatures are getting restless. They want me to let them in.
She’s sobbing now, silently because she doesn’t want to disturb me. It’s her tears that make me push them away.
I curl into a ball and don’t move for awhile. I can’t see anything but fingers covering every surface, so I reach out blindly for her hand.
“What caused that?” She still sounds shaken.
“The lamp.” I don’t get up. The room still feels soft enough to fall through.
“Should we get rid of it?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “It’s fine.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I lie.
She starts to ask another question. Stops a second later. There is terror in her eyes and I’m not sure if she’s afraid of me or for me.
“We’re going outside to wait for the ambulance,” she announces. There’s something burning in the kitchen because she never got the cookies out of the oven.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
There’s a finger hanging out of her cornea, there’s the sound of sirens in the air, and the tapping is still getting louder.