First I want to say sorry, because I’m not very good at writing. I just don’t have anywhere else to go to share this.
I should probably start with some background info:
My dad was a heavy drinker. Though I have some memories of him where he is lucid and present, they are few and far between. Mostly he was just drunk and I spent the majority of my time either hating him or dissassociating to try to escape the sick reality that was my adolescence. That’s all I have to say about that. Sorry.
That leads me to the present, and the situation I now find myself in. I have struggled with episodes of depression for as long as I can remember, and interspersed with those episodes have been suicide attempts. A few weeks ago I was pretty deep in it. Sorry, this is hard to write about.
There was a bottle of Benadryl on my counter, (happy flu season guys). I took it to my room, laid on my bed, and drank the entire thing in hopes that I would go to sleep for the last time. You know how it goes. Hahaha. Well, suffice to say, I did not die that day.
As I lay there, I began to feel shaky, like I had just drank too much coffee. Then it was kind of like I was moving my whole body through panes of electrical wire. Every time I blinked, I wondered if I had been holding my eyes closed for seconds or hours. Behind my eyelids were these kinds of faces or gears, growing in evermore detail with every second or hour that passed. The faces were all tied up, maws pulled open in permanent horror by the machines surrounding them. There were some with faces entirely made up of gears, and others with wires poking out of metal teeth and wrapping all the way around into their ears and eyes. Their ridged pupils looked upon me and I knew they were judging me for all that I had done (or not done) with my life. They screamed silently, berating me, the failure they were imprisoned to now witness. I wondered if maybe this was their job, or if I looked the same to them that they appeared to me– a horrified prisoner looking down upon them. Then I saw graphs outlined in neon, with myself in the upper levels while everyone else I knew, my friends and my family, were stuck in the bottom rungs. Like I had been pulled up into the astral plane by strings inside my hands, crucified where no one else would ever see or hear.
I thrashed and fought until I couldn’t move my body. I laid there frozen and yet still trembling. In my horror, my only thought was, “What have I done?” because I believed I would be stuck paralyzed inside my skin forever. I squeezed my eyes shut, curling into a shivering, sweating ball, and prayed for any reprieve, the faces still watching me.
My prayers were answered. My body began to feel normal again, and I opened my teary eyes to look around at the mess that had become of my bed. Nothing was out of the ordinary (except for the tear stains on my sheets). I was alive. Shaken, but alive.
I hesitantly stood up to go get a glass of water. On my way to the kitchen, I noticed it had grown dark outside, though when I had laid down it was early morning.
How strange, that there can be so many stars in the sky, and a few lights and clouds are enough to put them in hiding.
“Our universe must be very shy,” I thought.
I let that thought linger for a second, then took a sip of water– only for it to taste like rot.
“Very shy indeed,” spoke the voice behind me. In this instant, the once pitch-dark sky erupted in a swirling haze of red and gold, and I screamed until my voice was hoarse. Standing in my kitchen, as if he had never stopped breathing, was my long-dead father. My dead father, whom I had killed and buried.