I crept down the stairs of my house as quietly as I would when my parents were new and I was a disobedient child out of bed too early. The snow created the same cyan tint as mirrors on the frosted windows , and insulated every hesitant noise captured within. Everything was frozen in time for the wrong reasons, it’s a moment I’m not sure I’d like to remember correctly. I was interrupting a tiger’s lunch. I was in a pocket of space and time which I shouldn’t have been welcome to. I was scared to breathe for it may have shattered the ground I walked upon.
Everything was so still, I had transcended to an alternate dimension. The stairs I walked down countless times had become a stranger’s steps in a stranger’s home. Despite my doubts, I continued my stride and descent down the staircase. Had the dust not settled from my ventures throughout the main floor? How long does it take dust to settle anyways. I was delirious with sleep, hypnotically going about my daily routine carrying myself to the kitchen. I didn’t have work today, no errands to run or chores to complete so I’m not sure what compelled me to rush out of bed. There was nothing different about today than any other day.
I wasn’t going to leave the house, I could easily use the excuse that I was snowed in and good riddance, the landscape of pure white was a disorient all on its own that made me want to throw up. My mouth salivated at the overwhelming ambiance trapped in the corridor that lead to the kitchen. I could feel my stomach churn and lift from the adrenaline that began to seep into the far reaches of my body, making the nape of my neck dance. My fingers and toes became numb from the abhorrent attempt to kick my fight or flight into full swing. Every step across the Cossack rug became needles throughout my legs, that started with the sensation of hot coals on the soles of my feet. The deafening roar of my body in the silence of my empty house made me feel like I was really just a ghost; Following the kinetic energy flowing between the dust particles in the empty spaces that were carried by an unknown draft that drifted calmly towards the beans of light that managed to evade the snow trapped against the kitchen window.
I feared that a burglar had broken in and that I should grab the shotgun tucked away in the closet nearest to the front door in the mud room. I dreaded that scenario because I may have to kill someone because I had to and not because I wanted to. I felt indifferent to my own wellbeing and shrugged off the idea. The atmosphere was so different opposed to the rays of the spring and summer sun that flooded every corner of every wall with warm natural light. No I was walking into a time capsule of a corpse kept pristine in a memorial or a museum. I was captured in a moving photo unlike film or a memory. I feared these moments in between moments where I lose myself and become something I’m not. Every step becomes more automatic and heavy as this eerie feeling rises in my stomach. My heart crescendos as I get a full scope of the kitchen and I nearly throw it up, it’s beating so violently in my chest that it’s thumping in my throat. My eyes linger everywhere that you are not.
Here was that heaviness and the wrong feeling. Here I thought I was the ghost roaming my halls, and there’s an apparition sitting at my kitchen table. All my body’s warnings and the irrational thoughts were correct. Now I was desperate to be back in that empty space where I didn’t exist and I was trapped in between moments. I couldn’t rub enough sleep from my eyes to make you go away. I tried to cross my eyes to blur my vision and make you indistinguishable from the furniture. Any then you spoke. Oh god and then you actually spoke. It’s a curse that I can’t remember your voice, but my looming in the doorway had disturbed you , and your sultry voice was Ambrose. I couldn’t respond. My lungs were drowning and filling with the nectar of gods that flowed from your lips. I dare not utter a word as to not offend the divine sculptors which carved you. There was no doubt it would offend, my voice was something blasphemous and unholy. I knew my mistakes carried heavy on my breath something horrible. I carried not guilt or remorse but every part of my body and mind were something to be deeply ashamed of. Before I knew it I had blacked out and when I came to I was sitting adjacent to you at the table. You had hidden your face three quarters view in your crossed arms. You were the warmest color in the room. You moved frame by frame leaving acid tracers behind every subtle movement. My eyes followed every moving cell like I was drawing you for the millionth time in an animation I was unknowingly creating of you over the years.
This reunion was jarring and the reverb of awkward sharing of pleasantries created a cacophony of sound that bounced off the mild colored walls. I had read somewhere in an issue of People or Cosmo that yellow had a calming effect on patients in sanitariums. It surely didn’t help me and by the looks of it, you ignored your peripheral vision and I could tell that it didn’t help you either. The mess of flowers on the yellow wallpaper mocked our misfortunes plainly, it was an unnatural thing to see so many flowers in winter. You were among the sunflowers and marigolds, and other unnamed flowers created for some shitty kitsch hallmark wallpaper that belonged in the home of a god fearing housewife. it was an unnatural thing to see you sitting right where you had left me years ago and it was like no time had even passed.
The weight of my misfortunes and mistakes finally start to sink in and I begin to feel sick with them. Trying desperately to reason with self that it had all been a horrible nightmare or a bad dream that I had finally woken up from. You were living proof that I couldn’t run anymore, because you knew. No one else who was still alive knew, but you knew and you were disappointed in the desperate, burdened monster that i had allowed myself to become. I began to pray that you were here to finally put me out of my misery and kill me. But you just sat there and stared at me with such somber regret. I’m not sure if it was survivors guilt or the Nightingale Syndrome that had brought us together. You knew finally that there was no fixing me. Finally you understood that what was wrong with me could not be fixed.
I think that realization bothered you because your voice and your expression began to change into something new. I saw something in your eyes that I had seen a million times. Streets swimming with shellshocked limbless men who had shriveled under the weight of their napalm soaked tears which they cried for the innocent civilians that they had slaughtered in a different life. You and I were alike now. So much so that the tension I desperately feared I would feel if we ever crossed paths again had entirely dissipated. We were as I had always hoped we would be kindred spirits intertwined and sewn together seamlessly by the fabric of the universe.
submitted by /u/death-disc
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