Monday, February 14, 2011

A Place To Cry

This is a very short story I wrote yesterday during a particularly strong bout of anxiety. Further proof that we can overcome the strongest symptoms of mental illness and turn the energy into something creative. Hope you like it!



                                  


He lay tightly curled on the wet floor, clutching at his own knees as though he were holding onto the branch of a tree, trying to save himself from the raging currents of a flooding river. When he opened his eyes for a moment, they saw nothing but a swirling chaos of images he knew could not be real, unless he had been transported directly into a painting by Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch. He managed to see through this illusory blanket of terror, and focused on the place on the wall where he had pressed the tip of his pen to draw a large eye. The eye was simple in design, but its perfectly round iris held the reflection of all the complexities of madness. The liquid which had ran down the wall, leaving its dark shadowy drips on the surface had long dried. But he had outlined the marks with his pen to form teardrops, the glisten of which looked as though they had just streamed from the eyes of a mother mourning a lost child. The inscription above the permanently wide and weeping eye was still a blur, but he knew just what it said, and just how it looked, and just what it meant. "Sometimes we all need a place to cry" - the advice he had inscribed for no one but himself to see. 


The corner of the fire escape was walled in with cheap fibre board, leaving a doorway into a dead corner. His place. The place where his secrets dwelled while he slept, sometimes he felt that they fed themselves on the scraps of rotten food and cigarette butts that littered the floor, growing in their strength and power, ready to invade his shell once it lay shaking on the floor again. They would never be set free from this place, for he would never allow them to see the light of the alley, or the street, or the world, or the universe outside. They would forever be trapped in the black of the ink which was manically applied to the wall by a shaking hand, inside the unblinking prison of the eye, forever waiting. His death was warm, and wrapped around him like a dirty blanket as he closed his eyes for the last time.










Till next time


Ratty

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