...at the heart of madness is a broken love...
Love [luhv]
1. A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.
2. Sexual desires or wants.
3. A profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
:: One ::
Before everything else there is the need to be loved.
That's his childhood. The echo of his own footsteps as he runs after everybody else. There are always echoes. His world is made of glass and cold metal.
The part of him that still believes in happy endings thinks that if his screams, their laughter, the pain doesn't echo than it's not real. So he muffles his screams with both hands and doesn't let the tears pitter patter on the ground.
But they laugh at him anyway and it echoes and echoes (and echoes).
He loves his parents so much. He tells them every day.
"Hello, I'm home. I love you."
Is that strange? They tell him to stop, please, it's not normal. And it echoes.
Please. Stop it, please. It's not. Normal. Stop.
Broken sentences that break him into little pieces because his world is made of glass and cold metal and his reflection is shattered in the uneven tiles of the ground as he runs.
He runs and he runs (and runs away).
And everywhere he goes his feet echo. And everywhere there's the ragged in-out of his breath and the half sobs and the pain, louder then anything.
He blinks away a tear and trips on an uneven edge of something hard and unforgiving. He falls, like he always does because he's soft and small and he wants to be loved so badly.
He falls forward onto his hands and knees and hisses. It echoes.
And that's how he realizes he's hurt. That's how he realizes that his skin is scraped raw and that he's bleeding, little pinpricks of red swelling on the flat of his palm, clinging to it, like tiny balloons.
The echoes of himself feel more real then anything.
That's the first time he ran away. There are more.
Sometimes there's a reason, sometimes there's not. But there's always the cold and unforgiving truth that nobody cares. Nobody cares.
Not about him.
Once, he's gone two weeks. His parents have been fighting again in their usual stiff, silent way. The house is quieter than usual, music turned off. The dishes clink as his mother cleans them calmly in the sink.
Her face is blank. Bruised.
His dad is oblivious.
He wonders why she doesn't say anything, why she doesn't grab someone and say, "Look at me! Look at what happened to me! Why don't you ask me what happened?"
Why don't you care?
But he knows why she doesn't say anything. Why she doesn't mention it.
Because the echoes of her questions would make it real.
If he had someone to talk to, not like a shrink but like a friend, he would tell them that he thinks his mother can't love him. It's not that she doesn't want to, it's that he knows too much about her. That he's too much like her.
He'd tell someone that its not her fault and hope the echoes carry it back to her.
He'd told Matt once.
Maybe he loves Matt just a little, for the right reasons. Mostly for the wrong ones.
When he first meets Matt he's eleven and Matt still has brown hair and glasses that are too big for him. He tells Matt about the echoes and they sit together in one of those endless hallways.
They sit and talk long and loud and don't stop, trying to drown it all out.
But eventually they run out of things to say and Matt has parents that notice if he doesn't come home. Parents that like him, that care.
Maybe he adores Matt a little too obviously. Maybe he expects too much from Matt because if his own parents don't love him why should anyone else? But the word friend is delicious and exotic.
He says it over and over (and over again).
"Mom, have you met my new friend?"
"Mom, I'm going to my friend's house."
"Mom, my friend is coming over."
"Mom, he's great, isn't he. Isn't he, Mom?"
Maybe if he needed a little less and wasn't quite so desperately giving Matt wouldn't have turned around and twisted the knife quite so deep into his stomach.
Not his back, never his back.
He knows better than that because no one has ever stayed for him. And no one has ever bothered to say goodbye.
And, yes, even though friend is still sweet and strange on the tip of his tongue he always knew it would come to this. So he doesn't turn around, determined to say goodbye, this time.
How could he have guessed that it would have ended like this?
Matt's jeering laughter, the loudest echo of all and it won't fade, it's there all the time driving him crazy. He just wanted to make it stop, dear god. He just wanted to make it stop.
That's what he whispers to the match, his breath making the wispy flames tremble before he drops it through the slot.
"Make it stop."
For a beautifully perfect moment the crackle of fire drowns everything else out.
:: Two ::
The truth is, not much has changed.
Everything is made of glass and cold metal and the echoes are tangible enough to rip into pieces. He does.
He changes wards. The echoes are louder and louder (and louder still).
He stops needing. He stops loving everybody so damn much because love tastes bitter and sharp. He shuts off.
And then there was Lucy.
She scares him.
There's something in her dark eyes that looks like love but also like hate and the sameness of the two makes him tremble. She looks at him with fire, like she could tear him into pieces.
She burns a hole through his chest from across the room, cutting through the other people, the useless tears and empty denials.
He didn't cry.
He's numb; all the tears frozen inside his head, making him cold and robotic. He is a mommy's boy now, isn't he?
She melts that a little bit. Late at night, his shallow breaths the only echoes, he imagines water dripping out his ears, little pitter patter echoes like teardrops.
He imagines she'll melt his brain into an ocean and drown him in it.
There are five of them sitting in a circle. They have to tell each other why they're here. Nobody makes eye contact and Lucy stares holes into him like bullets.
"I'm here because I'm fat," says the blonde skeleton with a girl's face. Something about her makes him sick but he can't look away. He counts her ribs, the bones in her arms, her legs.
"You're not fat."
His voice is unsteady, unused. It echoes around the enclosed room.
"You're not. You're. Fat. Fat. Fat."
The girl's face contorts, trying to cry and trying (and trying so hard). She can't, there's nothing for her to cry out. She pulls at her hair in frustration, in despair and it falls out in her skeleton hands.
He's horrified. He's watching a person come apart before his eyes. And all the while, Lucy is burning him alive. The skeleton girl drags her fingernails across her face, screaming at them.
"Why am I so ugly?"
Angry, red gashes cut diagonal across her human mask. He wants to look away but he can't. He wonders what she sees when she looks in the mirror. He wonders what other people see when they look at him.
Very good, says the attendant, bright smile painted on. She looks right through them.
Everyone here looks right through them. They are the least real thing in this place. Sometimes he sits very, very still and holds his breath, trying to disappear completely.
His shrink scribbles this down when he tells her.
Is this what he is now? Quietly snatched breaths and the swirled scrawl of a fountain pen in a black notebook.
Sometimes he loves Lucy back. Her stare keeps him pinned to his chair, to this place, to his life when he's on the edge of falling over and just becoming completely invisible.
It's the day after the day he loses track of what day it is. The hallway patrol walks by his door, footsteps echoing long after they're gone.
He breathes out. In. Out. Out.
A raw whisper slithers through the crack under the door.
"Simon."
(Simon, Simon, Simon.)
He's never heard her speak before but he knows exactly who it is. Lucy's voice, like her dark eyes, burn him.
He touches the door, half expecting her heat to seep through the wood. But it's cool to the touch. He sets his palm flat against it.
Eyes closed, he can picture her hand pressed to his on the opposite side. Another kind of echo.
For some reason his breath hitches; comes faster, louder, harsher. His heartbeat echoes too, beating wildly, drowning everything else out, so loud he wonders if his own heart is still beating underneath the layers of noise.
"Simon."
Breathy now, but still dark. Still that strange mixture of hate and love, like he's balancing on a knife tip and the fall to either is long and dangerous.
Almost against his will, his other hand trails down, across the trembling skin of his stomach. White skin; almost see-through, he thinks suddenly.
His shaking fingers stop at the rim of his briefs.
"Do it."
Barely a hiss, darker still and filled with anticipation. He imagines her pressing her hand hard against the wood, urging him on. He imagines her hand on fire, burning through the wood, grabbing him. Burning him.
His hand slips further.
"Lucy."
One month, three weeks and seven days after the day he loses track of what day it is they tell him he's cured. He feels Lucy's dark stare burning him through the walls and wonders when he became such a good liar. The word echoes in his head. It sounds like her.
He leaves and doesn't look back.
:: Three ::
Be careful what you wish for.
He understands what it means too late. Isn't that the point?
He's invisible.
Walking without noise, without echoes. A mirror without his reflection. It's like he's erased himself from the world. They all see right through him.
Not that they didn't before.
Freak. Weirdo. Creep.
The world continued to turn while he was inside, trapped between white walls and a violent attraction that still wakes him up at night, holding his mouth shut with both hands.
Because if there are no echoes…
He isn't now, completely real. Like this. He gets stuck once, for hours. He sits in his parent's dining room and doesn't even notice he's turned until his mom takes his chair out from under him. And even then it takes him a second to understand, to connect the dots that should have been obvious.
Does a tree make a sound if no one's around to hear it fall?
Does he exist anymore?
A lazy thought forms in his half conscious state: Maybe Lucy did kill him this time. Maybe he's in hell. Maybe he's in heaven. Things go fuzzy around the edges and he tumbles to the floor.
His mother looks at him, surprised.
"Simon? Where did you come from?"
She turns away and he lies unconvincingly to her stiff back; she doesn't care. The lies taste bitter and metallic. There's a faint pitter patter echo, like water. He realizes he's bleeding. He bit his tongue.
It still hurts the next morning when he goes to do community service.
Is it wrong that this is the best part of his day?
There's a little echo of yes. But he can't help it. These people are bound to him in a way they can't break free off. They can't just turn around and walk away. There is no goodbye.
He can turn his back on them. He can almost trust them.
They killed together.
And if that's what it takes for people to look at him then goddamn it, what is he suppose to do? He needs them. That's the truth, which has never been very nice to him.
Why break old habits?
Why when Nathan looks nothing like Matt, except for the familiar sharpness in his gut when Nathan looks at him and laughs? Why, when the familiar feeling of his insides melting is so comforting? More echoes.
But Nathan is less cruel.
Nathan doesn't hate him, it's just who he is. Words spilling from lips like waterfalls, choking him up sometimes by what Nathan says, the meaning he hears behind them that make him wake up with his hands covering his mouth for different reasons. Nathan couldn't stop himself if he tried. If his life depended on it. He thinks it'll get him killed some day and he's right.
Over and over (and over again).
And then there's Kelly. Kelly who protects him. Kelly who cares about his feelings because she understands. Kelly who can hear his thoughts and just smiles at him.
Our little secret. Our. Secret. Secret. Secret.
He loves them, these people, all of them. These freaks, who don't dislike like him and that see him and are linked to him and ways they can never break.
He loves them. And maybe someday, they'll love him back.
(A fading echo. Love...)
Just trying out another style. Hope you enjoyed.