expectation
When he opens his eyes to see in front of him a ballpoint pen and a black notebook, he thinks that for a moment his heart stops.
He reaches towards the items with weak, trembling fingers, brushing the items lightly with his fingertips as if they'd crumble away like dust.
They don't, and he thinks that maybe he's dying as he picks up the items, almost surprised when they have weight, and he clutches them so hard he can feel the press of his phalanges through his skin.
The pen gripped in a fist and the paper hugged to his chest, he can't stop trembling, his eyes feeling as wide and watery as the world that he hasn't seen in who knows how long.
He thinks the feeling is elation, the sensation of a dove trapped inside his chest and beating its wings wildly against the bars of his ribcage as it tries to escape his hollow body to become a free and abstract entity that can be held by no walls.
The feeling is too intense for how weak he has become, and he's sure that his bones are so brittle that any moment they will shatter—not the graceful rupture of a wine glass, glittering shards of diamonds in all directions, but the inelegant splintering of old and rotten wood, too decayed to make any sound louder than a dying breath of relief.
He shakes, trembles, shivers, feeling so close to falling apart because gripped against his chest is all that he can ever remember wanting.
When he eventually brings the items out in front of him, arms handcuffed together and still shaking, the pen and notebook are smudged with red-brown fingerprints, and his eyes have never felt so gray as they turn into rainclouds and he can hardly see through all the water, thunder shaking him down to his bones as he shoves the items away from him and tries to scramble away, jerking to his feet only to crumple again to the ground, cracking his head slightly against the concrete.
He clenches his eyes shut, but the afterimages behind his eyelids are blinding.
When he opens his eyes and stares at the items again, they're lying in a puddle of half-dried blood that makes his cuffed wrists ache in memory.
He's struck with the sudden thought that blood used to smell like copper, and he wonders when it was the scent became so normal that he stopped being able to notice it.
He caters to the pain in his wrists and head for a few moments, acknowledging the throbs as existing and then filing the thoughts away as transient and therefore irrelevant information, before slowly pushing himself into a sitting position, ignoring the way the pains flare.
He slowly drags the items from the puddle of half-dried blood, wiping them on his tattered, grimy jeans with hands that he wishes fervently would stop shaking.
There are more emotions coursing through him then he can remember ever feeling at once, the monotonous hours of no days and no nights running together like a monochrome watercolor painting that never has a chance to dry, and he feels electrified.
He feels electrified, and when he opens the journal to count the pages and finds there to be only thirteen, he feels everything stop—his breathing, his heart, his thoughts.
He wonders again if maybe he just died, but as soon as he has the thought he knows that he hasn't, and then the pounding of his heart is filling his ears like a waterfall, and the world swims before him until something in his unconscious mind forces him to start breathing again.
His heart is compressing like a black hole, and there's something dark and sinuous slithering out of the void in his chest to curl around his throat, slowly tightening, and he feels cheated and tortured.
His bones are showing through the skin of his knuckles as he grips the pen and paper and thinks that hope and opportunity are the most terrible things in the world, and he was far more comfortable without them; because, like life does not exist without death, so too hope and opportunity could not exist without crippling, mind-numbing fear.
He finds it ironic, then, that the items are now stained with the blood he'd drained from his body simply so he could feel something, when now he feels too much and wishes he could go back to feeling nothing at all.
He feels pathetic in a way he hasn't in along time, self-loathing in a way he hasn't in a long time, and hates the way the calm resignation has slipped from him and hates the way he wants that complacence to return because he thinks that maybe he should be better than this.
It strikes him, in that moment, for some unfathomable reason, that he's wearing a loose long-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans, articles of clothing that seem familiar in all the wrong ways and like they don't really belong to him, and he has no idea where they came from or why he's wearing them. He finds himself aware, too, that his left wrist even with the cuff feels too light while his right feels too heavy but grips the pen with a certainty he didn't know he possessed.
But still his hand trembles as he lowers it towards the page, and he cries out and throws the pen across the cell because it isn't fair that he only has one pen to write with and only thirteen pages to write on, because that isn't enough space to empty the turbid, torturous contents of his mind.
He shoves the notebook away towards the pen with his toes, and is distracted for a moment by his bare and grimy feet and the toenails he has to chew on so they don't get too long. His hair, he notices, touches his shoulders, and he wonders how long he's been here, locked in this cell.
He turns his back to the items and presses himself against the cold concrete wall, face buried against his knees, and tries to ignore their existence. He hates that he can't.
There's an itch in the back of his mind, now, like an animal scratching at a door, and his chest hitches because he thinks it might eat him, tear him to pieces, and he just wants to sleep but he wonders if there's even a point to being alive if he's just sleeping, because how different can that be from death?
His thoughts are stuck on a carousel with the speed turned on high, and he can't get off, and he's so incredibly sick of it.
There are sobs trying to jump from his chest into his throat, like salmon up a waterfall, and he loathes himself so much it hurts, but he loathes everything else more.
He thinks that there's no point to being alive, hating the way that his mind keeps coming back to that conclusion but still insists on rerunning the path to that conclusion over, and over, and over again, as if the location at the end of the path will suddenly change if it's retraced just one more time, and he thinks he must be insane because he thinks he's heard that only an insane person will do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
He thinks he must be insane, because the existence of the pen and notebook are burning into his back with the same intensity as dark, wall-blank eyes that never blink, and he feels like he's staring into an abyss, and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee; be careful lest thou become also a monster...
Something inside of him is being bitten up and swallowed, like an apple. He can hear it crunching, but the pain is a vague, indeterminate thing, like he's ill all over.
He just wants to sleep, and he laughs because it hurts and it's so ironic that he's been wanting pen and paper to write with for as long as he can remember, but now that he has those items he can't bring himself to use them, wishing vehemently that they'd never appeared and he wasn't being taunted, tortured with this opportunity, this false hope.
All he'd wanted was the ability to write something, but he's suddenly painfully aware of the fact that he doesn't actually have anything to write, and that even if he did, writing would be completely meaningless. It would change nothing.
He wonders if maybe he'll only ever want what he doesn't have, or if maybe some things are better off as dreams—should never be turned into reality where they'll be revealed to be empty and hollow, a prettily wrapped box with nothing inside.
But it is not the emptiness that is so terrible, he thinks, trembling and on the edge of falling apart, but the expectation that something was supposed to be there, and that that something was supposed to be worth waiting for, fighting for, hurting for.
All the pain was supposed to be worth something, but in the end it's worth nothing, and everything is meaningless, and he wants to cry because his thoughts are stuck on this carousel and he can't get off.
He's so sick and tired of it, the weariness settled deep in his bones like the freezing temperatures that lead to hypothermia, and he wants the carousel to stop because he's dizzy and so, so sick, but he knows that the only way to make it stop is to die and he doesn't want to die, and it all hurts, and it's all so absolutely fucking hilarious.
And there's nothing for him to to do but laugh; and so he laughs, laughs so hard that his jaw aches and his lips split and his abs cramp and he can't breathe. His laughter echoes back to him around the walls of the cell, loud and delighted and deranged and breathless, and he thinks that if he were in a story he would certainly be the villain, because he's pretty sure that only villains laugh like this.
He feels insane, and he wonders if anyone else has ever felt so beautifully, incredibly, elatedly alive.