A/N: This kind of came out of nowhere one night when I was really, really tired. It's just a short poem-thing about James - I personally found him to be by far the most compelling character in the Silent Hill saga, and I thought it would be fun to write something short from his perspective, since his mind is so deliciously demented. And just to get it out of the way, I'm as sorry for this as I've always been. :D
Disclaimer: I don't own James Sunderland or Silent Hill 2, because if I did it would be a 2000-page novel and not a video game.
James Sunderland
dreams in monochrome abstracts,
endless shapes floating in a dark
arterial red,
angular and unnatural,
inhuman
(geometry?)
but the only thing he sees is
Mary.
In the dark
he mistakes his footsteps for her heartbeat
and listens as it falters and
goes silent
every time,
fragile and fleeting.
He feels the air in his lungs congeal
as he thinks about his own mortality.
How easily human life is lost.
How easily everything is lost.
(You might be headed to a different place than Mary.)
James Sunderland
wheezes under the suffocation of his grief,
freezes under the looming threat of reawakening,
clutches at his surroundings like a drowning man.
He sees ghosts in dark corners.
The spirits of the dead
curse him in low,
somber murmurs,
and their words of hatred become a mantra
on permanent repeat.
He is hunted by the phantom of
(his heart, his soul)
his wife,
and he fears what will happen
if she catches up to him –
imagines her ripping the guilt
from the pit of his stomach,
choking him with it,
shoving it down his throat
and forcing him to gag on the bitter taste of human sin
until it kills him.
In the back of his mind he can hear himself reciting
(See my dead wife and go home, do some laundry…)
meaningless apologies
to a person
that he is no longer sure even existed to begin with.
James Sunderland
chooses memories
(of all things)
to hide behind,
takes a map and a car and
pretends that they can help him escape.
He takes a paper and a picture and
pretends that they can save him.
Suddenly,
(see no evil, hear no evil)
James Sunderland is blind.
He is blind
and deaf
and dumb,
exactly as he'd like to be,
because Mary died three years ago and
(lies are so easy to tell to the dying)
he will never see the difference.
Like I said, it's really short, but it was sure fun to write. XD As always, reviews make me smile goofily at my computer screen, and who doesn't love when that happens?