When Moths Fall Asleep

0.0 - the cold

 On that morning when the scream at last emerged, no one thought, "Oh dear Lord, stop that" as they would for many years to come when this exact pitch would be reached again and again. That morning, all was, "Thank God," and "Finally."

He didn't know that, of course. He didn't know any of it.

He didn't want to, anyway, which almost made it worse.

The cold breathed down his skin with harsh, rabid bites, making his skin recoil and his head spin. Since when had he been so despised? The warm embrace of his world, the way it pressured around him, that familiar throb that said something was alive and with him. So quickly had it disappeared, a crude new set shoved in its place.

Here, he dared not even open his eyes. Something, something felt so wrong there, a sear that made him so paralyzed, so utterly afraid, so frozen inside. If he had had words, there is little chance that he would have used them. The shock that burned inside was such that no small comfort or rationality could possibly soothe it.

How strange, awful even, to realize the smallness of his own self. Head, foot, all touched on every side by a hard boundary of frigidness, taking his surface area and making it visible. In the womb, at home, there was no beginning or end to him. There was just matter and matter and matter and, sometimes, the gentle voice bubbling from the other side.

He longed for it in such a fervent way that it hurt in his stomach. His little red world, soft and ever quiet. That muted noise of a world outside never teased him, never taunted him. He never wished for it. He never wished for anything, never considered anything that was not the little red world, that was not quiet and wonderfully dim, and warm, always warm.

The screams drove into his ears and stung, digging straight into his heart with a burning. His lungs ached, the most pain he could possibly fathom, and he could feel it rising in his throat like fire, like awful, sputtering flames. The screams were his and he hated them, yet, how could he prevent them? To stop himself would be beyond his own possibility.

The voices that had once been so sweet and gentle, muffled through the wall that vibrated at the side of him, where were they? Now, everything was sharp and hard, horrible sharp language that cut into him at every possible angle. He screamed, screamed, shrieked, but he could not match them in the way that they made him feel unsafe.

Oh, the red world, where nothing had ever threatened him. Just soft music from the outside and maybe, sometimes, a quiet tap that said, hello there.

The cold became solid. He could feel it on him, touching his skin. He widened his screams as the cold lifted him, taking away the last scrap of warmth that remained in the softness under his back. The loudness, the sharp words came closer and closer, looming over him. He felt his heart bursting against his chest with a fast clenching.

And then, like a rip in his skin, such a wall of lonely cold slammed against him that he couldn't remember ever experiencing a moment where he wasn't so unbearably frozen, so pressed on all sides by this rawness. The sensation of it was almost cognizant of the way that the red world would swaddle him, opening and closing around his hand. Only now, that sweet, tame dog had gone feral and attacked on all sides.

The coldness crystallized around him, became dry again. It seemed to seep into him now, pulling into his core. The sounds and the words and his own screams hurt him, spiraling like a hard rain.

No one in the room could remember, of course, that on the day they were born, they had felt all this with the same raw intensity, that they had listened to the voices and they had cried and screamed and wished they could crawl back into their safe little pocket of the world where nothing could disturb them. But since none of this has ever been deemed by a mind important enough to be retained, no one knew the pain that raged with an arsenal of fire in his heart.

But though none of those people knew, nature has always known. She has thus equipped man in such a way that while he may be forced to leave his home, he may always have another, elsewhere.

He felt this, so smoothly and softly that morning when the cold at last fell away.

In that cold, hard, too-bright world, there was, finally, repose. The warmth swaddled him with the gentlest pressure, the way the red world had. It muffled the sounds, turned his eyelids dark. But most of all, he felt that beat, that pulse in the warmth that meant he was not alone.

And he wasn't alone. With ginger fingers she tucked the blankets closer to his skin, grazing his cheeks with her knuckles. He felt the screams in him subside, painted over with the wonderful solace of his mother's arms.

She had a voice and it said the same words that everyone else's did, but it wasn't virulent in his ears the way the others were. He could feel each change in tone that she made, constant buzzes that caressed his burning lungs into submission.

He had left his little red world for this terrifying white one, but maybe there was a place here that could still be safe.