Random Works

Short Story 2: Psychosis

It’s September 11th 2001 and I am staring up at a demon in the sky. The creature is made of fire and black smoke and it is attempting to escape its cage inside the building. It flees across the open sky and as it does so it condemns all of those who stand beneath it…

But then it’s not September 11th 2001. In fact, I don’t know what date it is. Time stands still in this place and there’s no way for me to get out. Maybe I’m the demon in a cage.

There’s a world that people get stuck in without knowing it. Only I know, and therefore I know how to avoid the wrong people. There are racists, homophobes, fascists, bigots and all kinds of sadistic creatures… In my experience it helps greatly if instead of being stuck there, instead of giving in- you simply create your own world. Certainly, your disenchantment with reality can become so intense that you end up locked away, like me, but your mind is your world and that stays with you.

Sometimes you have to run. Sometimes you have to lie, cheat, steal. It’s necessary hurt, though. It’s good hurt.

You are going to feel lonely and you’re going to feel lost… but I’ve heard that sometimes you have to go through a lot of bullshit before you can reach your nirvana.

That day was when my troubles started. That day when all I could see in my mind was fifty thousand people burning. Because I had to wonder (the questioning is irrevocably inevitable) whether I am destined to come out the other side of things.

Having so much control was bliss, but dangerous in the hands of a mad girl.

A part of me wants to know why I was dragged down and molested by empathy whilst other people had their moment in the darkness and moved on. Were they saved? If so, why wasn’t I? Why didn’t the same hand that came and yanked them free grab hold of me too? Is there something wrong with me? These are the questions that pushed me over the edge into the abyss of insanity. Why believing in destiny made everything so much more painful, because who could bear to be created just to be tortured in one’s own mind?

Is the world my test or am I the world’s?

Each day I wake up and I am in the same place. On my ward there is strict regulation; apparently it helps you get better. Each day I am monitored and told that my minders are my saviours, but it doesn’t feel that way. Nobody is able to stop my phases, my pre-destined plot of mental highs and lows- controlled or sporadic, meditated or erratic.

Looking around me brings confusion. So many other people are in their world here, but they all seem so unconscious. Like drifters. As far as I can see I am the only person who is aware of the power my mind has.

Before I had been taken away I would watch people going along their daily lives. So few other people seemed consumed by a prominent thought of impending doom- did they not understand that every thought, feeling, breath, movement, moment used up part of their life? That instead of giving them completeness it left them a little more broken and incapacitated than before? How could it be that they were allowed distractions through wonder and pleasure, able to dodge around the riddled cracks in our lifetimes where falling could lead to death- or worse, depression?

Careless or carefree?

What sounds must surround them, envelope them, that they might be spared from the infinite screams of conscious corpses. The rotting bodies have called for justice for so long that their faces are disfigured, skin torn apart at the join between the upper and lower lip. Every cry makes them contort and break until the cycle starts again.

That is what I see and hear. Everywhere I go.

Life becomes a chore when you feel like you are already dead. I know that they think they are helping, but this lockdown is driving me crazier. Crazier. Perhaps in some way, then, it does help to be surrounded by other people are struggling. In the real world I just felt so intensely juxtaposed, like I was the greatest paradox and mystery the human race has ever known. My ability to see destruction felt like a gift at first. When I was blinded to certain things that the world could see, I saw things that they couldn’t dream of. I saw the horrors and it was thrilling.

Breathing allowed me to live, but as life became effort so did breathing (and vice versa). Genuine sleep came in fragments but otherwise I managed to walk around subconsciously, live life without living it at all. My world was dark and cold and lonely. Bathing cleaned my skin but the worst dirt was underneath, coursing through my body and infecting everything that makes a person go tick tock tick.

All I wanted was to find someone who engaged in the same mind-set as me. Just one other person that could bring an end to my isolation.

And that was when she found me.

At first I was scared of her. But when I started seeing her everywhere, when she didn’t disappear… it was like the companionship I craved for had come to me. Considering the state of my mind, someone who was there from the moment I opened my eyes to the second they closed didn’t seem abnormal. It seemed like a delightful treat. She taught me things without using words, showed me how to separate the people around me into two different categories: those who were toxic and those who did not matter. She was kind.

It all turned sour, of course, eventually. Would I be in a mental institution if it hadn’t?