The lights from her electronic clock are blinking up at her
while she blinks back at them. Her head is spinning and throbbing and aching
from having been forcefully dragged out of sleep like that, but she still
shakes it anyways, and slowly slides out of bed.
She stumbles a bit, but she’s come to expect that, so she
defeats gravity and paralyzed legs, and gently treads to the bathroom.
She takes another long hot shower, ignoring the way her skin
is turning red from the heat and how much her water bill is sure to go up again
from yet another one of these nightly escapades, but she doesn’t care because
all she wants to do is wash it all off, the blood and grit and screams and
crushed bones and!
She bends over, gasping for air.
It’s time to stop with the shower now.
She walks back down the dark, silent hallway, too lonely to
be walked through alone, and slides back into her room, soundlessly closing the
door behind her. The faint light coming from the lamp is her comfort, because
the darkness closes in on her and envelopes her body to the point she can’t
move or speak or breath.
She sits in front of her open, blaring laptop, bathed in the
digitally blue light, and starts to remember, remember again the crushed bones
and the way he screamed and screamed and howled in pain and she doesn’t even
know who this person is and!
She picks up her phone using only her index finger and her
thumb, and slowly speed dials one.
There’s a sudden harsh ringing from the inside of the phone,
and it rings once, twice, about five, six or seven times before she loses track
and the ringing is coldly cut off and an even colder, groggy voice replaces it.
Again?
She does nothing but sit there. The lights are starting to
hurt her eyes and her eyelids are drooping from the heaviness but she just can’t
sleep or she’ll start to think and see and smell and hear the screams, oh the
screams, and the sounds of the!
She can’t breathe again.
You know I can’t do
this every night. I need to sleep.
She dry swallows a large pill of guilt.
Either go to a
therapist or something, or figure it out yourself. I’m tired.
Now she’s swallowing an overdose, but she knows even that
won’t help her forget, and in fact she thinks it’s worse now, and she needs to
stop, just stop and, and!
Go to sleep. Night.
The phone gets cut off by a new type of blaring as she
meekly mumbles a “Sorry” that's muted and never makes it into the world of the loud.
The clock keeps blinking up at her.
Her body is already asleep now, but her mind isn’t, because
her mind never shuts up, and she just wants to go to sleep without having that
stupid nightmare and remembering an incident that doesn’t even affect her since
it’s not real, it’s not real in her life or anytime soon or whatever and why
can’t she forget that scene!
She chuckles to herself in her mind, because she always knew
she was spoiled and selfish. She just got the most vivid scene she could ever
write into a story handed to her on a silver platter, and she’s trying to kick
it off of her instead of taking it like it should be.
She yawns, and asks the world to please just give her a
break tonight.
She wakes up again two hours later, and everything’s
repeating itself, and she supposes that in itself is a real live nightmare of
its own too.
