Ghosts of the past

I stared out the fogged bus window and watched as the world passed me by at a rapid pace, the late night winking at me as if it knew I liked the darkness, somehow.

In my mind were pictures, cold dead pictures, freaky pictures, some might say hallucinations.

The air was cold and eerie, seemingly magnifying the cold whispers in the air, each sending a shiver down my back with a touch of thrill.

I smiled.

Smiled because of the dark place that my mind is. Each time I cleared some fog with the back of my hand and looked outside, I’d see something creepier than the last, first a band of zombie brides masquerading as sacks of coal by the roadside, sometimes a little girl in a yellow raincoat with a devious smile that ran off into the woods.

I push in my earphones a little deeper and drown myself in heartbreaking music, closing my eyes to feel it deeper, occasionally wiping away a stray tear off my cheek. The journey is going to be long-twelve hours at least, but I am already deep into my feelings at the fourth hour. I know I’ll tire and drift off to sleep at some point, or even get distracted from my own sadness by the pitter patter of the rain on the bus roof, the whoosh of the tires on the wet asphalt.

It’s hard to pinpoint my reason for being sad, really. It could be the fact that I live with a narcissistic emotionally abusive father in a tight space, or the fact that I feel neglected by my mother at the tender age of twelve. It might be that I have no friends at school (chronic social anxiety, is what Catherine said), or maybe it’s that one male teacher always picking on me, putting me down verbally, giving me the best of corporal punishment. Maybe it’s the boy who said I was too fat, the drunk neighbor who insists, loudly might I add, that I should be his wife and not a student, or everyone else that dismisses his creepy behavior with a laugh, or every adult who tells me to smile more because I have too much of a mean face as a girl.

I don’t know.

All I know is that I rarely sleep at night, in spite of being exhausted from cooking, washing, and studying, wishing I was dead, dying, or both. Looking up painless ways to die at midnight, and realizing am too broke to afford any of them. Meeting strange people on the dark internet that offer to kill me hit-man style in exchange for crypto coins, or performing impromptu séances to call on my dead grandmother to come and wisp me away to the afterworld.

Anything to get out of this six-foot deep hell hole.

If I were to define the sadness that surround my life, I would put it like this; being warm-blooded but always cold, listening but never hearing, and looking at lit-up places with black-and-white filters. Void, numb, unfeeling.

I convince myself that it will get better, that as I grow older, become happier, and get wealthier, I will leave everything in my past behind me. I will get on a plane and go to a faraway land, build a glass house by the beach, tune off every signal and simply listen to the sound of the ocean waves, calling me home, telling me we’ve made it. That everything I have ever gone through in my life was preparing me for this moment, the quiet and peaceful ever after.

But I find myself stuck in the same boat, ten years down the line.