I didn’t know when I slept off or how I did. I remembered staring at my broken devices, the shock refusing to wear off, the night refusing to end so I could wake up from the terrible nightmare.
I remembered sitting there for hours and hours, hearing the clock tick, watching the world pass me by.
And when the shock eventually wore off, I remembered it all, the throbbing in my jaw, the burn in my eyes as tears blurred my vision.
My years of hard work was gone in a puff of smoke. My arts, every single one of them. My comfort. My home. My utopia. Gone.
Reality made my eyes twitch and my fingers clench. Heat built and simmered low in my chest, each breath shallow, feeding the fire.
I didn’t know then what was wrong with me. I just knew I had never felt such emotion before, never. The world around me had blurred out, the edges of my vision tinting in red as I abruptly rose to my feet.
I remembered how I felt nothing but the anger cracking like a forest flame in my chest. I didn’t feel it when the sharp pain of a broken glass embedded itself into my foot as I trudged out of the room. The air was bitter then, the tension in my chest corded like a wire ready to snap. All I saw was red, and my mind bounced between grey, bleak, and black. I was in no control when I charged into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. And all I heard behind the crack of the closed door in my head waskill her, kill her, kill her.
So, when I barged right into Mother’s room and reached the bump hidden under her cover, all I wanted to do was kill her. It was all her fault. She had ruined everything. The one thing that managed to keep me afloat. Drawing, and my silly little poems were my way of taking back control from the world that had rendered me unwanted.
Every time my stylus glided against my screen, every time I wrote, I felt whole. I had the power of creation in my hand. And I had created so many universes inside that room, safely inside those devices. Some were completed, some were work in progress.
But she wiped them all off.
She took everything from me. And that night, I thought she deserved nothing but death. I remembered driving the knife right through the cover, over and over again. I poured all my years of hate, anger, neglect, and regret into every motion of the knife. I wanted her to bleed. I wanted to hear her scream and beg.
But there was a problem.
I couldn’t hear anything, nothing at all that sounded like the cry of agony.
And I couldn’t see anything.
No blood.
Violently, I pulled the cover from the bed and all I saw were the pillows whose cottons were spilling out and flying around.
A loud roar sliced through the air like a primal cry of rage as I continued to stab the bed and the pillows over and over again, until I was worn out. Until my lungs burned from screaming.
My breaths were shallow, sweat coating every part of my body as I collapsed beside the bed, body trembling.
Then all of a sudden, something snapped inside me. Like the light that was momentarily snuffed out had been breathed back into me. It felt like a dark cloud finally clearing to give way to the blue, like a mask being pulled away from my eyes. I could see clearly, think clearly, hear clearly.
That moment hit me like a cold wind, gasp ripping from my throat. The knife had slipped from my trembling hands, hitting the floor beside me with a loud thud.
I had raised my hands to my eyes, my heart pounding. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t believe what I almost did. I almost took a life with these hands.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Then a voice suddenly slithered through the quiet, and my head snapped to the other side of the bed.
There was a brown chair. That was where Mother would usually sit to read her Bible. And that moment, she was right there, perched on the chair, hidden by the dark.
“You are just like him,” she said. “Like father, like daughter.”
“No.” Panic broke through the haze of shock as I shook my head frantically. “No, no, no. I’m not. I’m not like him. I didn’t. I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” She raised a taunting brow. “His blood burns in your veins, doesn’t it? His darkness lives inside you.”
“No,” I sobbed, clawing at my hands, at my face, feeling the need to peel off my skin and rid myself of this body.
“See why you have to stay here with me?” She rose to her feet gently. “I am the only one who knows you. I am the only one who stayed despite it all. No one will accept you when they know the monster that lives in your head, the darkness that breeds inside you. No one will ever accept you like I have accepted you.”
“Stop!” My hands had flown to cover both of my ears. “Stop.” I had roared, my chest burning. I didn’t want to hear her truth. Her truth was wrong. Her truth was vile.
“It’s time to stop dreaming, Beth.” She stood by the door, her body angled slightly as she watched me. “You can’t fly too far away, now. The world will not accept a filth like you.”
