Bad Boy Playground (h.s)

twentyeight

love the way you lie

Harry

The burn of hot water is cleansing.

Cold air from the vent mixed with the scolding temperature of the water creates steam that spews from the shower head. If I close my eyes I can almost trick myself into believing it's a sauna. Or the pits of hell absorbing me.

It's suffocating, yet lung opening.

I use to love horror movies. Classic horror movies. Black and white on the screen, the steam looked so welcoming. The protagonist would stand under the stream of scolding hot water. Head tilted back and eyes squeezed shut.

You never really dive into the psychological aspects of a hot shower. Why humans crave the burn and raw skin. How the pain feels like pleasure. How the pain shoots neurons to your brain to signal danger. How you can actually feel the pain instead of feeling nothing.

Blackout numbness.

I'm not a numb person. I feel and I feel deeply. I know what love is and I know what crushing anxiety feels like. I can feel. Usually.

But standing under the scorching flow of water from the shower head, this. This. This is the first stimulation I've had for the past week.

Burning my skin raw is making me feel alive again.

Looking down at the pink hue on my chest and shoulders, it's different from the diluted pink cloudy water flowing down the drain.

It's cleansing.

A hot shower is the dishwasher of people. Forgive my lack of analogy, it's far fetched; but a dishwasher sterilizes. The heat kills all the bacteria and filth from the glass or plastic. Making it new and safe to use.

A hot shower burns the sins and evidence off of a persons skin. So it's the closet feeling to cleansing your body. Wiping away the debris.

As I stand here, burning alive, I still don't feel clean. I can feel. But I don't feel clean. Drenched in soap, scrubbing my raw and pealing skin, I don't feel clean.

Watching the droplets of bloody water run down my legs and clog around the drain, I don't feel clean. Scribing my raw and cut up knuckles, feeling the burn leach under my skin, I don't feel clean.

I don't feel clean. My skin is raw and pealing off my body but it's not enough.

Because as vigorously as I scrub and further mutilate my skin, my soul is still filthy.

I'm still a monster.

7 hours prior

"Father John is blackmailing Hope with her grade in math, in exchange for sexual favors."

Have you ever had an outer body experience? One moment you're walking down the congested hallway and the next everything goes mute.

All your surroundings disappear and noise cease to exist aside from your heart pounding out of your chest.

thump. thump. thump.

A bomb has been placed under your skin. Ticking and ticking. It's in beat with a countdown. A timer. Before all that it is encased in explodes.

Leaving everything in its path disintegrated.

"You're really fucked up you know that." I hiss in Emma's disgusting face.

She's a liar. An absolute lair. What the fuck did she just say? No. No that can't be true. That didn't happen. Peach would fucking tell me if that happened.