A Slow and Utter Breakdown By M.M.Wake
It started when I was a child I suppose and then I grew up.
That’s how it usually works, or so they tell me.
It came and went, Childhood that is. I remember the lines and the shapes, the words and the voices. Pictures of bedtime, the midnight hanging gloom, dusty shadows and the awaiting melodramas lingering at dusk. The constant wondering and wandering, eyes searching through darkness and half light, shades of sleep, sitting wide eyed upright, high on the edge of fear and ready to fall.
To fall into what- Insanity?
What is beyond fear?
A complete and utter breakdown.
Maybe the word is terror. Real terror can only be imagined through the eyes of a child, a cruel twist in the brain that shifts the sands of normality where all is abnormal.
I like to think, even if only on the outside, even if I don’t believe it myself that there is a cure. I have to hope or what is left, apart from the misery that is mental meltdown?
I know 'they' call it a ‘nervous disorder’. I know it waited and watched until I was alone. I never caught sight of the sly creature, the shape shifter, always out of my eye line, lurking around the corners of my life. Yet I could always sense the presence. A need to escape would overwhelm me. Inside the house I would rush for escape towards the door, the silent intruder at my heels groping within, my tired heart clambering in the stark terror of the chase. The icy hands gripping and pulling me back.
Of course, I always escaped. The grip loosening as my hand reached for the door handle and pulled me to safety away from the terrible thing, the blackness, the bleak and the drear.
But it never left me. I could see it in the eyes. The only visible presence it allowed. A painted face hung in the dining room. She watched. I know if I looked long enough the face would change, the features twist and distort and the terror would be complete. I watched as long as I could bear, but it was never long enough.
The slow, steady stare always upon me.
When I left home the fear subsided for a while, loosening myself from whatever dwelt in the imagination, or something more terrible. Deep inside I knew the nervous diagnosis was just a cover for something darker, an unearthly evil, a primeval fear I had tapped into.
Although I enjoyed the freedom of those years away, a dark presentiment chased in the corners of my mind, and I was never entirely free from the grip and knowledge that this was not the end.
And here I am in the house again, several decades later, older and none the wiser. Of course I have visited the old place in the course of the years, but evil is sly and omnipotent and it waited.
Returning to the house my spine tingles with a sense of dread, a shrillness passing through my very core. The death of dear ones can be unsettling, even unhinging some might say, especially to the over imaginative, the sensitive, but I know better.
I will push the door open into the dining room and she will be waiting for me, like I knew she always would, the eyes ready to greet me. The fear begins to rise and my hands shake. My whole core begins to break down, my heart racing into the distance and as the face begins to move and contort I will fall into a blackness from which I will never return.
Copyright M.M.Wake 2011
http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/24019/a-slow-and-utter-breakdown to download free to kindle /iPage etc
That’s how it usually works, or so they tell me.
It came and went, Childhood that is. I remember the lines and the shapes, the words and the voices. Pictures of bedtime, the midnight hanging gloom, dusty shadows and the awaiting melodramas lingering at dusk. The constant wondering and wandering, eyes searching through darkness and half light, shades of sleep, sitting wide eyed upright, high on the edge of fear and ready to fall.
To fall into what- Insanity?
What is beyond fear?
A complete and utter breakdown.
Maybe the word is terror. Real terror can only be imagined through the eyes of a child, a cruel twist in the brain that shifts the sands of normality where all is abnormal.
I like to think, even if only on the outside, even if I don’t believe it myself that there is a cure. I have to hope or what is left, apart from the misery that is mental meltdown?
I know 'they' call it a ‘nervous disorder’. I know it waited and watched until I was alone. I never caught sight of the sly creature, the shape shifter, always out of my eye line, lurking around the corners of my life. Yet I could always sense the presence. A need to escape would overwhelm me. Inside the house I would rush for escape towards the door, the silent intruder at my heels groping within, my tired heart clambering in the stark terror of the chase. The icy hands gripping and pulling me back.
Of course, I always escaped. The grip loosening as my hand reached for the door handle and pulled me to safety away from the terrible thing, the blackness, the bleak and the drear.
But it never left me. I could see it in the eyes. The only visible presence it allowed. A painted face hung in the dining room. She watched. I know if I looked long enough the face would change, the features twist and distort and the terror would be complete. I watched as long as I could bear, but it was never long enough.
The slow, steady stare always upon me.
When I left home the fear subsided for a while, loosening myself from whatever dwelt in the imagination, or something more terrible. Deep inside I knew the nervous diagnosis was just a cover for something darker, an unearthly evil, a primeval fear I had tapped into.
Although I enjoyed the freedom of those years away, a dark presentiment chased in the corners of my mind, and I was never entirely free from the grip and knowledge that this was not the end.
And here I am in the house again, several decades later, older and none the wiser. Of course I have visited the old place in the course of the years, but evil is sly and omnipotent and it waited.
Returning to the house my spine tingles with a sense of dread, a shrillness passing through my very core. The death of dear ones can be unsettling, even unhinging some might say, especially to the over imaginative, the sensitive, but I know better.
I will push the door open into the dining room and she will be waiting for me, like I knew she always would, the eyes ready to greet me. The fear begins to rise and my hands shake. My whole core begins to break down, my heart racing into the distance and as the face begins to move and contort I will fall into a blackness from which I will never return.
Copyright M.M.Wake 2011
http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/24019/a-slow-and-utter-breakdown to download free to kindle /iPage etc