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The voices in my head were getting louder by the day. A pervasive melody of guilt that never truly left my head. I tried to dance around it, to avoid it, to shut it out, but with every door that I shut, two more broke down. And the day the voices finally broke down my final door, the day I let up my fight…
Was the best day of my life.
It’s egregious to think that the day I finally gave up was the day I found peace, but perhaps that’s the way life is.
Before I used to tune out the voices- try to bury myself in anything I could just to get away from them for just a moment. It was a never ending battle in my head. A never ending battle that I fought while trying to keep up the facade of being a functioning human being. For, I never felt that I was any of those things.
I was neither functioning nor human. How can anyone even bear to call themselves a human after carrying the blood of another on their hands? How can anyone bear to spend even a second happy, knowing that they held the weapon that ended another’s joy?
My life was one of a simple man. I wasn’t much of an extrovert by nature, and when faced with the loquacious nature of my peers, I faltered. The type to find prosperity in simple things rather than focusing on the elaborate intricacies of human life.
But there was something wrong. A fallacy of my thinking, of the wiring of my brain, of the development of my psyche.
I became a restless man, a bitter one. One no longer deserving of kindness, but of condescension.
Three years ago, I shut myself off from the outside world. I spoke naught to any human being, living off the vegetables in my garden and seeing the fleeting glimpse of sunlight only from my porch.
But then the voices got worse. The paranoia began to creep in- that someone was after me, that someone, something was trying to kill me. That one day I’d wake up with a rope around my neck or a knife to my heart.
And every day it got worse. From a paranoia, to a song that played in my head on repeat. I couldn’t even turn around for fear that someone would be standing behind me.
I stopped eating, for perhaps the water I used to water my garden had been poisoned.
I stopped sleeping, for in the time I was asleep, one could easily break my window.
I remember that fateful day like no other. March 23rd.
My hands were withered, shrivelled, and thin, my sunken eyes barely staying open from exhaustion. I found myself too weak to even move.
And for the first time in years, came a knock at my door.
This was it. This… was the person after me.
And all I could do was shiver in my place on the rotting couch, the song of paranoia in my head blasting so loudly that I could barely even comprehend thought or spoken word. All I heard was a creak, a blurry female voice, and footsteps.
Footsteps that seemed far too loud. Far too close. Far too….
And all I could feel was adrenaline. My ears pounding, my arms aching, my head spinning. It wasn’t as if I’d found new strength. No. I was weak as ever, but I was desperate. Desperate to destroy the voice in my head that was singing to me for the past year of how I was going to die.
Desperate to prove the voice wrong.
And so I picked up the first heavy object and threw it in the direction of the voice.
When I came to, I was lying on the same ratty couch.
I knew naught of what had happened. I knew just that I was alive. And that meant I’d defeated the voices in my head. That meant I could eat again. I could sleep again. I could live again.
Only if I knew how wrong I was.
When I woke up for a second time, I stood, for the first time in weeks on shaking feet, falling to the ground and crawling across the ground like a dog, and the sight before me sent me reeling.
A woman, lying on the ground, her skin pale, a large dent in her forehead, a shattered cement brick on the ground beside her.
It was an ugly, unbecoming sight.
Dare I admit, it bolstered me. It was evidence of what I had done, what I had achieved, what I…was.
It was evidence of how sick in the head I was- that I laughed. That I rejoiced. That I stared at the woman with joy rather than regret.
But this did not quell the voices. The voices went from a song of paranoia, to a song of guilt.
My mind constantly shifted- shifted between triumphant and agonized. The guilt ripped me apart, yet also brought me out of the spiral I was in.
I’d feast like a king only to vomit it out an hour later.
The day I realized what I’d become, and the day I gave up… was the equivalent of plunging oneself into a bath full of scorching water, only to have all of one’s burns healed the very second he stepped out of the water.
I woke as usual that night, in a cold sweat, the dream of the woman’s crushed face being the only one that I ever witnessed in this cruel theatre that I could not escape from despite bashing my fists against the wall until they bled. My eyes felt like they were on fire. My hands couldn’t move. My voice was sore from screaming.
With every motion I made, I felt the woman behind me. And this time when I checked over my shoulder, she really was there. Behind me. Staring at me with her empty, glazed over eyes that bulged out of that dented forehead. I turned around again.
There she was, those dented, empty white eyes peering at me from behind my closet.
I felt her bony hands crawling out from under the bed to grip my feet, her bloodless heart beating, a soulless metronome that forever haunted me. I tried to run, but behind the door, there she was again, a disgusting smile on her face.
I slam the door shut, but there she was again, her ugly, shriveled hands creeping from beneath the crack in the door.
I could swear I felt hands around my neck. I could swear she was coming for me. Today was the end for me.
This was my end.
As I fell to the ground on shaking knees, barely even breathing, I felt her hands wrapping around me, making me shiver in fear.
But she never hurt me. She just held me.
I felt a wind in my hair. I felt her hands around my shoulders. I felt her hollow cheeks resting atop my head.
Of course, this was all a hallucination. Just another agony created by my twisted, hollow mind. And so I gave up.
I gave up fighting the woman and let her cold, windy apparition envelop me.
The cold sweat slowly stopped running down my back.
The tears quit dripping down my bony cheeks.
My breath got quieter, softer.
Eventually, she disappeared, and I was alone with my thoughts once more.
The guilt chased after me again, soon enough. But it was a new kind of guilt. Not the type that drove a man mad, but the type that I felt deep in my stomach. A sort of hunger.
But not for food.
For justice.
Justice for the woman.
Punishment for the sinner.
I conceded. I conceded that I was alone, that I had nothing left to keep me from turning myself in.
And it felt wonderful. It felt wonderful to take a breath and know that it was over. That I was done fighting. I relished in this feeling for a moment, falling to my knees and thanking whatever entity was out there for this moment of solace.
I might have spent a minute there, with my hands clasped before me, or I might have spent an hour. Maybe a day.
I’d lost all sense.
Not just sense of time or sense of direction, but sense in general. I was no longer a human being but a shell of something that might have once been.
Once I finally came enough to my senses, I stood and walked to the police station to turn myself in.
"Too far gone,” they said I was. And I couldn’t dare disagree. I would never disagree with a statement more true.
I deserved my punishment. Most don’t let the voices dictate what they do, but I gave in. All the others held it together, while I fell apart.
The hour of my execution has finally arrived, has it? Ah… well then I will take the stand with grace and acceptance.
I can’t say I don’t wish I’d never been born. I’m glad I had the opportunity to live out this life, yet watching my world crumble makes me wonder what it was all for?
Then let me go out with grace. Let me bow to the audience and say farewell to this beautiful story of a life with elegance.
So, as the moment of my death approaches and I reach my cherished agony, I implore…
World, forget me.