And reality came back to me.
I stood in the darkness there, alone in a room that was nearly pitch-black. I was scared and lonely. I was confused because I had no idea where I was or what was happening. My arms and hands were numb, my throat was sore, my head hurt, my ears were ringing, and the room I was in had a strange, extremely dim, red glow.
I tried reaching forward to feel the wall in front of me to get a grasp on reality. Immediately my arms began throbbing in pain and I felt a warm liquid run down my arms. There was a dry substance all over my arms that I felt crust and crumble as I bent my elbows to reach my arms forward. It felt like the stinging pain in my arms was following the exterior of my veins.
My hands were encrusted in whatever was on my arms, making them hard to use. They were also completely numb, though not functionless, making them extremely hard to use.
I fell forward with my arms held out in front me. I caught myself against a wall just a few feet in front of me. The wall was coarse and scraped the palms of my hands as I landed on it. The pain in my arms caused me to fall against the wall.
Immediately the strong reek of chemical paint flooded my senses, and a cool wetness smeared my face from the wall. The odor was so over powering that I fell to the floor, and the liquid that rubbed off onto my face stung my eyes. My arms rubbed against the wall as I fell and a searing tearing pain wrought havoc through my nerves and caused a searing pain inside my head.
I felt like I was going to cry, but instead of tears, it felt like searing chemical pain was trying to tear its way out of my eyes. Unpleasant.
I began crawling away from the wall, searching for some sort of comfort. The floor was hard wood, and I could feel splinters crawling into my knees as I slid across the floor. My fingers made contact with a soft, velvety object.
I focused on this object to try and clear my mind. Soft, wooly, and warm. The scent of a female body lingered. It felt heavenly between the numb fingers I clung to it with. I held onto it for dear life, as if it were life itself, that letting go was death, and that I did not want to die.
My brain switched patterns, my thoughts went from the object of comfort to a realistic sense of what was going on. I did not know what was going on, but there was enough light to tell.
I stood up, slowly, pain creeping into my mind, but slowly being pushed away as I struggled to grasp reality.
I was relatively in the center of the room. Six feet to my left was a wall with a door and no other significant features than the wooden from of the door, a small metallic fixture that once was a gas light, and a poster of some indistinguishable character doing something unnecessary. Four feet in front of me was the wall that I had fallen upon to support myself. On the far left of this wall, in the corner between this wall and the wall previously described, was a similar wooden door with a frame similar to the one previously described. However, in the center of this wall, in front of me, were a great number of words and markings in red and black; many of which were undistinguishable, but some of which were revealed by a small glimmer of light and read ‘I relinquish the turmoil of… realize now that I am a… always will be… you are free from these lies… the other side has diminished… opportunities to go there… beautiful place… I don’t belong there…’
The wall was covered in these red and black words. I followed them further right of the wall they were on to a large line of fingers that ran red and black across the far right of the wall and onto the next. This next wall was about seven feet to my right and had two windows, both several inches from the floor; the one on the left side of the wall was just a few feet from the corner of this wall and the previous wall that was in front of me. The second window was a few feet to the right of the first window. Both had been covered with blankets and nailed shut with wooden boards. The blankets had small thin patches where they had worn, but only a little light shone through.
The wall behind me was irrelevant.
I stood for a moment grasping at the idea that I was in a room. I looked up at the ceiling and realized there was a ceiling fan hanging a few feet from behind where I was standing.
I then smelled smoke through the thick chemical aura that had consumed the room. I looked at the floor and noticed the ember of a lit cigar. I picked it up and put it in my mouth because it is me to have a cigar in my mouth.
This brought me back to thoughts, and brought clarity to a patch of indistinguishable words that made clear sense suddenly. They read: ‘Me I am me I am a collection of minds From one perspective Producing one perspective From the perspective of someone But only one That is me I am a different part of myself I am the cognitive abilities of mind My mind That has lost some attention to reality But at no sacrifice to me To others, yes But I am me I think Therefore Am I? I am the perspectives of others Perceived and comprehended by me I am the ability to realize Hence why I call it reality Reality is what I perceive it as As it perceives me And I realize reality Therefore I am my reality I am me. I suppose in reality I am a creation Of other me’s The life that I live The works I accomplish Worth And value I am a measurement of my own beauty A measurement of my own efforts A realistic idea of a human being Thought up by the many persons who’ve perceived me Who I perceived The experiences I’ve shared with them And the result of this collection Is me. I am me. I feel as though the world Lacks people like me Therefore I am My soul is expressed by no one else So I express it I am unique And should exist Because I am me I am me. I have been abandoned by my own reality I am crushed under circumstances Tortured by words and phrases and names I am cursed by my attainment of comforters Because I am me.’
The door on the wall to my left opened. Light poured into the room and pasted my silhouette on the wall I was staring at. I realized that I was wearing red glasses. I did not take them off, I simply stood there staring at my brightly red shadowy figure that stood amongst the markings and words carved into the wall with red and black.
I heard a sharp gasp and a short whimper that followed it, with a clasp of hands to mouth that followed that. I slowly turned to the figure that was now standing in the doorway to light. She was a short, skinny, but beautiful blond girl.
“Hello reality,” I said to her.
The expression of her eyes was terror. Somehow this was comforting to me. She was holding an object in one hand and was holding her mouth with the other. Her eyes were wider than I could have imagined they would become. She did not look happy.
“Is it the wall,” I twisted my head loosely to the wall and then turned back with my head tilted to one side, to view her response, “Or is it me? Or should I say is it the wall that is me, or is it the person standing here that once was me?”
She stood silently. I couldn’t tell if she was trembling, but I thought she might be.
“I wonder whose words these are. I wonder if I wrote them. I wonder if they are me. I wonder who I am,” I posed these questions to the wall, or maybe some other invisible audience, then I turned to the girl, “Who am I?”
“You…” she stood staring at me thinking carefully, removing her hand from her mouth, “are…” her expression changed with these words, “hurt!? You’re bleeding!”
She immediately rushed forward but I retaliated with an open palm held firmly extended straight from my body in the form of one of those traffic police guiding the mindless to stop.
I observed her back up to the entrance of the room where she stood to continue watching me. I continued to hold my hand up and realized while looking at her that my hand was completely black, the red tinted goggles making it very challenging to tell this however, so I removed them to confirm.
My hand was indeed completely black with paint. I looked at the other hand and realized it too was black. There were red streams of blood flowing down from my arms to both hands which I proceeded to follow up to my shoulders. There were cuts running from the bottom of my wrist and back of my hand to the top of my shoulders and some to my chest. Blood was dried that had run streaming down my arms. Blood still was seeping from certain parts.
I looked back to the wall that was covered in my words and realized that half of them were drawn in blood and half of them were drawn in paint. The streaks that lead to the right side of the wall ended at a blood stained knife stabbed into the wall.
I looked back to the blond girl standing in the door way and said, “I don’t know what happened, but I’m still alive so it looks like I won.”
She stood there watching me.
“I don’t suppose you know who I am, do you?”
She continued to stare in silence.
“I’m really askin cause I don’t know, hun.”
She then pointed to the words that were revealed on the wall that I had not noticed before, ‘Bleeding the walls for voices of thought that speak to me in echoes of silent screams that tore the sky open. Cuts like portals to the cackles of the mind hollowed by empty corners between streets of souls intersecting souls. Angels don’t cry, they kill. Death is an answer, not an option. Love is a choice, it was not chosen. Perception is what lead me down this road of skulls and hollow laughter, feelings are the wheels that brought me to the cross roads that lay before me the choice to love. Yours and mine are the souls standing at the corners. Yours is on the other side. They will not meet. Good bye. My venture is not to the other side, but to the sky.’
“No,” she finally said.
I stood staring at my words for a moment. I then looked back at her, “I guess that’s how I say goodbye.”
“Or is it that you are goodbye?” she replied.
I smiled, looked back at the wall, reading the other words that were there, and said to myself, “Man, my arms hurt. This was such a bad idea.”