Toxic Us.

:E:

I curled up into a ball, my thin linen sheets bunching up around my knobby knees. They appeared stark white in the light sun filtering in through the window on the other side of the room. Pots being hit with the spoons that stirred them sounded out like a dull cry of pain to highlight what I felt.

I could hear my mother singing.

I closed my eyes at the footsteps, which could only be my fathers, Kevin was out with friends for a movie night. I felt the bed dip under his weight and he stoked my cheek tenderly.

“I wish it would go away too Belle” He had called me that since my childhood years, it was the one word in French he knew, despite taking the course all the way throughout his schooling. He said it meant beautiful.

 “It never will, will it?” I asked, bury my head deeper into the pillows.

“No”

He was never one for tip toeing my father.

“It happens with every pill, every drop, every medication passing between my lips. I just want it to stop”

“It won’t, you need to learn to accommodate it Belle. You’re stronger than this, and you’ll fight it” His tone was light.

“What if I just stop taking them?” I asked.

“You’ll get worse” He replied, smoothing the flyaway hairs on my scalp.

I knew that.

I could feel it, the worsening.

I saw it in the bathrooms when my legs shook so I could barely walk three steps. I could feel the headaches and achy bones. I could feel it all.

“I wish I wouldn’t”

“I know you do, but wishes don’t happen”

“I know” I sighed.

“Do you still get them?” He asked as I sat, my face feeling the cool air circulating around the bedroom.

I shuddered, my whole body convulsed for a second before I nodded.

He nodded, hugging me tight my arms twisted in odd ways before he left me to the silence that lingered in his wake.

I always got the night terrors with the poisonous pills that filled my body. They said when I was young that they and the other symptoms would subside, but neither the tremors, nor the nightmares that infiltrated my sleeping figure had shown any sign of letting up.

As I grew the phantasms my mind conjured in my sleep changed.

Now they were worse.

I saw Curtis, with his back facing a river in the midst of town. His feet were bare as his toes gripped the edge of the bridge. I just watched him close his eyes. I screamed at him but I remained unanswered. He leant back, falling through the air like a rag doll. His limbs failed as he collided with the water, disappearing into the blackness without a sight he’d ever been there.

I woke cry each time, just as I would tonight.

I didn’t know why they were of him.

I didn’t know why the faint words of love rose upon his lips as he fell.

He always looked at me, murmuring the words.

Then he fell into the abyss, leaving my lone figure screaming from beneath my bed sheets.