Crystalline
The shivers come in waves, spiraling violently outward from my core. April claims my body temperature has risen back to normal, but I swear I'm still out there trapped against that frozen earth.
Mine is the lone presence in the eerily quiet house, bundled up from head to toe in blankets and clothing and seated in front of the fireplace. The flames lick playfully upward at the air and I wonder why I can't feel the heat they create. I am close enough to see the smallest of embers, but too far away apparently for the warmth to reach the place I exist in. It seems physically impossible, but it is my reality anyway.
It's been a long time since anything made any kind of sense so it's not foreign to me.
I long to sleep but can't let myself wander there. I am painfully alive and stone cold dead at the same time.
Somehow the hypothermia and frostbite stole away my ability to be able to process anything but two extremes, numbness or bitter cold.
When the numbness deadens my nerve endings terror captures me. My mind panics, questioning whether sensation will ever return. But every single time I am promptly reminded to be careful what you wish for. Sometimes feeling nothing is a blessing compared to what's truly there.
The bitter cold always slices back in. The shivers wrack my body and snatch my breath away. I'm hardly a medical expert but somehow I know this isn't right. I shouldn't still be shaking. I shouldn't still feel the cold seeping in through my skin. I can't rid myself of the tremors. I can't get warm. I can't find my way back from the icy place where I left warmer pieces of me. My innocence. My sanity. My faith in humanity.
I haven't told a sole about the persistence of the shivering. I've been lucky so far in hiding it. There are too many questions I'm not ready to answer.
When you're ready, son. The words just faintly penetrate the deafening noise of my mental battlefield.
Today for perhaps the first time I can remember when my mother insisted I rest I didn't put up much of a fight.
I'm too tired.
I'm too frigid down to the deepest fibers of my body. The blood in my veins is freezing. I can almost feel the ice crystals forming and then traveling along the path of my form. They leave a trail of transparent scars inside of me as they flow along.
But in my heart and mind they are distinctly outlined, vivid in ever last ugly detail, and I know the shivers come not from the physical form of me but from a deeper more intangible place. The shivers radiate from my tattered soul. They are creations of memories that endlessly haunt me. Each torturous recollection and image leaves its residue in those ice crystals running cold through my veins.
And again my father's voice resonates through the most fragile and barricaded parts of me.
When you're ready, son.
They are hopeful whispered words. I long to someday be able to let their warmth seep into me. I ache for them to melt away every last icy crystalline scar that shakes my body, my mind – my soul.
I whisper my reply to the empty house around me. The words I could not gather before as he sat at my side now come freely.
I'm sorry, Dad. I'm just not ready yet.
With each syllable I speak the shivers intensify. And as the last word escapes through my lips his gentle reply stills them.
When you're ready, son. When you're ready.
I pray that someday I will be.
I close my eyes and grasp hold of my father's words just before the echo of them fades from my mind again.
And with my refusal to release them hope trickles in that this bitter cold which seizes me will not win the war being waged inside me.
The End
