There’s never an easy way to tell a story that never happened. One you never witnessed or experienced; grew or learnt from can’t truly be yours to tell. Of course, the world that comes to us – only in dreams, is a microcosmos in itself but very rarely derives the meaning of its own accord.
What we say they mean, is all they will ever mean and the time it takes to forget the novella of the mind is far more fleeting than the time it takes to record it. We dabble with these pocket worlds of unconscious creation, suffice to say, their application to every day will almost always lead to nothing – empty images populating the void of an empty skull.
An empty person taking emotion felt in another world as guidance for action in their own, has seldom created a tangible impact on anything except confusion, discomfort, and misconception. It is difficult to understand a realm to which we don’t belong especially when we start to lose ourselves. It’s uncomfortable to see our motion picture with a preconception of prophecy, how can we measure something we know little about? Why do the weak of mind let them sway judgement? Emotions grasp constricts, closing us into a corner of clouded judgement, going easy for the first bout; leaving you with a missing ear by the seventh.
Waking – frozen – drenched in sweat and tangled in loose linen. Still overwhelmed by the three or four layers of torment in sleep. She turns to the body that lay next to her nightly, only to find a space – dry and barren with a slump in the memory foam. A stench of Hermes battles against her faded Channel and body odour blend as a sense of panic grows.
She pulls herself up by the headboard – Her feet can barely sustain the legs attached to her shapely torso, and her knees wobble as if close to buckling. She sees her husband’s belt still looped through the 501s she had pulled off him roughly two hours ago. Two hours felt like twenty years in her slumbered state. A glance at the clock told her it was 2:37 AM – twenty minutes off witching hour – the time her mother always told her to stay in bed.
She thought she had time. Her wardrobe door was one big mirror, one she did her makeup in every morning and the presence of which, brought her husband a silent discomfort. She knew he was repulsed by them, but he accepted its presence despite the terror it brought him. He hardly told her why he avoided such things, but tonight she would understand in some form. As she checked the looking glass, all she could see was her pale face and sunken eyes, her auburn hair with tints of red at the tip over her straight shoulders and the void behind her.
A few blinking lights from electronics and the clock that now read time backwards. As she stared, her eyes began to adjust allowing her to see the white bedsheets and brown blinds that hung from her window looking out to a main road and charity shops dotted among foreclosures and four or five well-known fast-food chains. As more became clear, something made her feel uneasy. Something she knew was in the way, something she thought she knew, at least was dulling her senses and clouding her judgement.
She wandered through the halls, hearing laughter and sobs alternating like the voice box of the Buzz Lightyear toy her husband had kept from her childhood. Usually, the toy sat dormant on the shelves in the hall she was wandering through, right above the shoe rack.
It was gone.
She made her way into the living room, taking each step as it comes and eyeing up the picture collection they had hung on the walls. Pictures taken years before they had the home of their dreams, with four rooms. Half the house was separated, annexed into a space for her mother. Out of love and necessity, they took the eighty-year-old woman in to escape the fear and loathing that was wrought by her father, a twisted mechanic who broke as many souls as vehicles he mended.
It wasn’t normal but what is these days? It was their life and they made it work. Her undying urge to care was matched only by her husband’s innate predisposition to act as saviour to the dammed. Not an advocate for violence; not against inflicting suffering on those who inflicted suffering. The pair had been a dangerous force in their younger years, it kept the spark alive. Briefly, their chaotic vigilantism had rendered any relationship impossible, while the mistakes made sense at the time, it took a hefty tax on their humanity that only time apart would restore.
Mended were the ties in a few short years and grateful, they were, for the fates restoring their connection. And relieved, she was, to find her mother sound asleep in the annexed room – undisturbed in solemn slumber surrounded by her daughter’s collection of crystals and talismans placed to ward off evil souls (mainly her fathers) that may do her harm. The lady needed a rest, and they both did.
Curiously, the mirror in her mother’s room hadn’t the same clarity as the one in her own – as if the glass was just glass and her eyes could not see past the void. It felt peaceful, far more tranquil than the one in her room. It was at this moment that she realised; her peace was about to be disturbed once more. Only two people other than herself lived in the house. Only two people could produce a scream audible from her room.
If it wasn’t her mother, it was her husband. She traipsed through the white-walled abode, fixated on the ceilings and paintings adorning the plaster. Paintings produced by her lifelong friend who would visit often with a new proof of work for her trusted companion to decorate her home. Each one is a testament to memories they shared – pain and joy, sorrow, and laughter. Each one told a different tale abstractly. The paintings had stopped arriving around the same time as the artist’s funeral almost a year ago.
Often, she would still expect new work that would never arrive, waiting by the door in vain.
Backtracking on limbs, getting weaker with every step, the woman heard the screams getting louder. . . louder as they alternated between pain incarnated by audio and cackles of blood-curling laughter. She took initiative to stumble towards the living quarters she shared with her husband. While the mortgage wouldn’t be paid off for another thirty years, the idea of exploring her fantasies where her mother watched Deal, or No Deal was abhorrent.
She adored her husband for the man he was, from the very beginning to recent months. There had been a shift in his behaviour, a ripple in his mindset. They met on a popular dating application, as was common for people in their youth. It was rare that two souls destined to bond would do so through a leftwards swipe.
A swipe became a pint, the pint became cuddles on the beach. Cuddles on the beach became interlocking bodies in his rented first-floor room decorated by clothes on the floor, books and trading cards on the shelves indented in the walls. Most who entered would criticise the cards.All he wanted was someone to admire the literature. She gave him that.
She gave him twenty years of adoration and admiration, twenty years of growth and support that he strived to reciprocate. They worked in tandem as a team, the couple against the world with compassionate dominion in mind, the main goal. The world saw them as small and helpless, childish space cadets with laughable ambition. Surprising it was when warriors were buried inside with fire that burned bright and extinguished any adversary in sight. Many hurdles and individuals made many attempts to throw wrenches in their work.
Each one of them had failed because the fire in their hearts could never be put out.
In recent months, the bonfire had started to choke, she had felt his flame falter – burning to the wick – quicker and quicker as each day passed. What had happened to the man she had fallen in love with? The hollow husk that lay in bed with him was not the same as the perfect chrysalis that had drawn her in all those years ago.
Was this their plan all along? To fail at first and leave a mark, a love scar that would rip through time, pulling apart the seams that held him together until he had come undone. He had come undone; he had let his guard down all those years ago – security can be a false sense – one that should be reserved only for children in their infancy with stability. There can never be true balance, life is a scale that tips both ways day by day. No way to know when or how or why.
Whatever happens, happens.
Fear had filled her heart now, as she neared the bathroom – her beautiful lavatory white washed where they washed themselves each day. Not a stain in sight if it could be helped. She hardly noticed the numbness in her limbs as her lungs began to feel heavy. She wanted to cry but her ducts were dry, dryer than the coarse cackles and tortured screams, the source of which lay directly behind the white door. A framed picture of the pair hung before her, depicting her husband in the state she wished she could remember him in.
It was too much to bear now. As tired as she was, her feeble arms managed to grasp the cold, cold handle to the bathroom. She could hear the water running, she could smell the dampened air hanging thick under her buttoned nose. Her weak grasp morphed into a pitiful push down with the left hand, a pitiful push forward with the right.
Trying to take a breath, the thick air made her usual function a struggle. With the door now open, the scene inside was easily visible and triggered her instincts to scream but the words wouldn’t come out as the clock rung out a harsh ring, she saw the love of her life in the state he’d always intended to be but never had the power to make it so until he had help at 3 AM.
He was holding his old Buzz Lightyear, the face of which was now covered in half by blood.
The walls laced in the miasma that glowed a light red. The water of the bath steamed with a smell of iron and gaseous stillness. His writs were crimson and dripping into the overflowing bathtub, the plug had blocked the drain and began to overflow, leading a river of scarlet towards her white socks.
She stood as he painted her toes for the last time. His mouth and eyes – oozing like the visions he had had in his younger days and the mirror. . . His greatest fear had finally been overcome; he must’ve stared intently into the glass for a fair few minutes as he left one final love letter to her.
The alarm set to wake him for work still blaring, ringing relentlessly while she stood staring at her husband for the last time.
Your eyes are diamonds
no tips but wings; the fire of my desire
I want your love above the cloth and under
I’m running on empty, flying on broken wings
Each moment I’m swaying on the verge of capsizing
The waters are choppy and my acts can be sloppy
Your love fills me up, your words patch the break
The moon moves at your command, intended or not
You keep me sailing
Longing to admire the diamonds
I love you so much.
The alarm set to wake him for work still blaring, ringing relentlessly while she stood staring at her husband for the last time and the Buzz Lightyear toy fell to the ground, triggering the voice box.
“TO INFINITY . . . AND BEYOND”.
