The Me They Left Behind

The shadows bind all, especially when you think you're in the light.

You think the dark is empty, don't you? Oh, but it’s so wonderfully full of things if you just sit still and listen to the world die around you.

(A story, prompted by HVR and the picture he gave…)

Picture from Prompt

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I remember walking these halls.

I remember the first time, sweat beading across my face and the smell of shit and acrid cigarettes cloying at me, embracing me, welcoming me home...

I remember the time, too, being rammed into the room with no windows, no real light, and no more sense of self I could find.

That space, that place, so silent and still, with motes of dust settling to rest on the ground and my chest. I cried into that scatter, my wet mixing with the dry until it all became clay and I could reach out and touch it with the tips of fingers I barely recognized as my own.

I’d shape that clay, tracing it with my nails until it formed words, and I emblazoned them into my skin, symbols and sentences I couldn’t read but knew held something. The throat creaked and groaned as a skittering laugh escaped the lips, knowing all of it, all of it, all of it was so ridiculous and stupid and meant nothing except proof I remained alive.

The woman, that sad-eyed woman who wore the emblems of a nurse, promised through the door she’d be back to check on me, but she never did, never did. Never ever did. And I remained there, a dried out husk of a person who no longer hoped or wished or dreamed, but merely existed to exist.

So long. Ever so long I waited there in that darkened place, that thick and desperate berth with no wonder remaining to me. Voices in the hall faded into nothingness, the soft echoes of life once existing outside of the chamber they’d abandoned me to becoming nothing more than the rusting pipes inside the walls and hissing sweat beading from my pores.

I leaped, crashing into the thick iron, the door merely acknowledging the existence of this small being with pain for the effort. I screamed, my desperation at the loneliness ever creeping in echoing off the plaster and paper of the walls, but nothing came to me aside from my own tired sighs in return.

How long? How long? How long and how much longer could I stand being there? How many years had they left me in that room with no water, no food, no life beyond the decaying rot of the walls and the ceiling and the shivering remains of the vines creeping through the cracks?

Hours? Days? Years?

A hundred years. More. All the world ending around me, with only my embittered soul to remain as witness of the nothingness all of creation became.

The world was gone, and I found comfort in that.

I sank to the earth, that room and I the only things allowed to attest to the wonderment that, somehow, all of creation had existed and then no longer was.

How long? How long?

Eons. Only I, and the room, and the decaying rot of the vines and crawling things and loss to bear witness.

And She? She never returned. She of the Broken Promise, my only beacon of sanity in this darkened and desperate place, had gone and left the world to fall apart.

Dirt and muck and soft skittering things over me and under me and between me and through me, my mind desperate to find escape and freedom and hope. But nothing of hope was ever in this place.

There never was.

Just me, and the crumbling door and rotting walls and thickened, harsh, acrid air, and I finally felt peace enough to close my eyes and to sleep.

Light cracked through my eyes, through my mind, through the whole of me as the door shattered into pieces before me, and I cried out, screaming at the light to leave me to my peace.

Harsh bleach, acidic, cloying shit and industrial chemistry invaded my nostrils as arms, figures, dark shadowy things grasped at me, breaking me from the earth that had been embracing me and calling me its own.

I cried at that, too, as they brought me through the scattered remains of the iron door that had once separated me from the death of the world, into the hallway I swear no longer existed. Crashes and bangs and squeals of the medication cart as it tore past me and those captivating me in that moment, and oh gods...

She was there. She of the Broken Promise, the abandoning one who left me to rot and cry and burn, pushed the cart beyond my sight, caroming around the corner and away from the ones holding me, never having noticed I was there.

The sterile light seared my eyes, but even through the pain I could see yet another needle in one of their hands, and I screamed again, calling out that I didn’t need it that I was fine I was fine I was...

But it entered my skin, pushing through any defense I could make.

I remember walking these halls.

I remember the first time, sweat beading across my face and the smell of shit and acrid cigarettes cloying at me, embracing me, welcoming me home...

I remember the time, too, being rammed into the room with no windows, no real light, and no more sense of self I could find.

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Check out the original prompt here! Join on in!

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