The thing that stuck with Matt the most was how it felt. The feeling resonated in his fingertips and wouldn't go away. He rubbed them together and scrubbed them clean under hot water again and again, and even sucked on them hoping that he could replace the tingling sensation, the sense memory that lingered and stayed with him through everything.
It was there while he stood solemnly in the cemetery on a crisp summer morning, his dress shoes and cane sinking slightly into the muddy grass, trying to imagine what the sight of his father's casket being lowered into the ground in front of him looked like. It was there while all of his belongings were packed into two small suitcases and an old dusty chest as the once familiar house around him was emptied of everything else by neighbors and members of the church. And it was there on that first, terrifying night at St. Agnes. As everything moved in slow motion around him like a strange dream, he could still feel the clammy coldness of his dad's skin, the way that the blood had matted in his hair, and the terrifying place on the man's forehead where the hard bone yielded and became a pulpy mess of mangled flesh and brain matter.
As he lay there on that first night, he felt it and he made a choice. He let all of the pain come rushing in. The floodgates opened and he felt the tears begin to flow, and in that moment, it was as though all of his senses opened up and swallowed him. He let himself feel everything, hear everything, smell everything, taste everything. He held nothing back. He blocked nothing out.
The sounds of the neighborhood at night became a maddening cacophony. Police sirens. Car alarms. Running, shouting, drunken revelry. It was all happening at once, and it gave him a terrible headache.
His nostrils flared as smells assaulted him unrelentingly. Rotting food and garbage from the dumpster below his window. The stench of sewage creeping up from under the city. A dead animal lying in the road. Chinese food from the restaurant a block away.
It was enough to bring vomit and bile up slightly before he swallowed it again, and he could taste that too. It was absolutely disgusting.
And his skin was exploding. He could feel the humidity of the hot summer night sticking to him like he was in a sauna. The air blowing in from the open window didn't help because anywhere it blew across him felt like being in the middle of a tornado. His cotton pajamas scraped anywhere they touched him like sandpaper, and the sheets below him were worse still. Underneath it all, the springs in the mattress dug into his flesh like he was laying on a bed of nails. it was torture.
And despite the intensity of everything else he was experiencing, behind his eyes there was still a void of nothingness.
Gasping, he rolled over and off the bed onto the old wood floors of the room and landed with a bruising thump on his stomach. The wood felt as hard as cement. He placed his palms on the floor intending to push himself up, but gave up. Instead, he examined the floorboards. They creaked underneath him. He could feel every crack, every nail, every splinter and every piece of dust on his fingertips. But, he realized, something was missing. There was no sensation of skin, or hair, or viscera. There was only everything else, an entire world on fire.
So he surrendered to it. And everything hurt. And he didn't know if he wanted it to stop hurting. 'It's better this way,' he thought.