All love stories, if told truthfully, are also horror stories. And while before we even met, any freshmen in school could have told you everything I'm guilty of- I've never been a liar. Even now, when you know me for what I am and hate me because of it; I still have this compulsion, this suicidal obligation to replay our snuff film over and over just to see if it will end differently next time. But it won't. And I know it won't because I wanted to take the hit. I wanted to be what I thought you needed. And even if you never forgive me for not tapping out, even if this means I didn't love you enough to stop loving you, I know if I could go back I wouldn't do anything differently. But I can want to.
Everyday I wake up and wear the remains of us the same way I wear that tattoo you put on my chest. It's ugly and makes me itch when I think about it, but what's worse the impossibility of ignoring what continues to breathe. For awhile I thought if I gained two hundred pounds and that tattoo stretched until the phoenix mutated into a duck, I might resemble what I'm positive you did to me. In reality there is no way to measure what the baggage you left me with weighs, but it feels a hell of a lot heavier than anything I could gain. Maybe I just thought if I could no longer recognize my body, I might actually be a new person.
Not that I'd ever tell you that. And I never told you anything I wouldn't tell my doctor. It's not that I don't trust either of you; it's just that you both have frustratingly restrictive view of what it means to be a healthy person. Take sleep for example. My doctor talks about my sleep patterns as if they were a particularly hideous design for wallpaper, and he would rather burn down the room than try to paint over it. Yes, you two are alike. But he may have a point.
Either my waking life has become dangerous and twisted, or my nightmares have become frighteningly mundane. Either way I don't think I can even trust myself anymore.
The dreams come in disjointed torrents, one scene after another sliding together, rolling like stormy waves through my mind.
Last night I dreamt I was sitting in a branch of a redwood tree. The tree was beautiful, but tied to my branch was a rope and in its noose hung the bloated, stinking carcass of a pig. Hanging like Judas Iscariot. Like some horrible, decaying, low-hanging fruit.
And the pig looked up at me through its terrible maggot-incrusted eyes and laughed- mocking me, its jaw stiff with rigor mortis. It called my name in a familiar voice. I tried desperately to block it out, but with its ugly brays of laughter, the tree began to tremble and shake. At last both became so overpowering, I was thrown from the branch and landed on my back with a cold biting pain.
When I opened my eyes the dream had shifted to another scene, another nightmare, but the overwhelming pain was still there. I was lying naked in the shower, the blinding florescent lights exposing everything clinically, ice cold water raining down from the rusted spigot. My hand was gripping one of my mother's butcher knives. The wide blade was lodged firmly in my back and I was bleeding out, my body circumventing a hundred tiny streams and rivers of orange blood water. My eyes closed again as my body lost feeling.
I woke this morning unscathed, in bed, as expected. The house was deserted, and I stretched and headed down the hall to forage for some breakfast. But something made me stop mid-stride. Thelight was on in the bathroom and I could hear the shower running. Looking in the open door, I saw the empty shower with the water running full blast. I walked in numbly and turned the nozzle off. Looking down I saw a butcher's knife lying in the stall- clean and glinting from the shower's spray. About a foot outside the shower door you could just make out half a bloody handprint where someone had tried to crawl out.
*More to come