Blood in the Mouth, Light in the Mind

We are told, the light is safety, the darkness, a trap.

We are told, the day brings to light what is done in the night.

But.

It had been a long time since I had slept during the daylight hours. I had tried to avoid it, ever since the week following my 11th birthday. That's when a rapture tore the ligaments and tissue that held everything in my world together. It happened, at midday. Away from the twilight hours. During the bright safety of an afternoon of no consequence, with the warm sensory embrace of Arabica coffee from a plantation in a poverty-stricken country.

Then there was blood in my mouth. Memories faded behind a wall of sleep. I slept. And when I woke. The blood was gone and everything else was, with it.

We are told to take care when walking home at night. Stick to well-lit places.

The lie.

We are told.

I do not know what happened to me all those years ago. My 11-year-old mind has locked away those memories and strait-jacketed them.

Fragments often seep into the melodrama miasma maelstrom of everyday life.

My everyday life, spent sleeping at night, staying awake during the day. Without fail.

That sounds easy, you'd think. I do that anyway, you'd think.

But. Trust me. It's harder than it sounds. Those odd days when you can't cope with life or are nursing a migraine or hangover, and need to sleep when you need to sleep.

What do you do then?

Do you just let sleep take over?

Or do you try to fight it? Sometimes win, sometimes lose.

Then sleep takes over.

Then sleep takes away.

Then—

Well, I can never remember.

We can never remember.

Sleep takes so much. Day-sleep

My fight against day-sleep isn’t always successful.

Once, I found a park bench. Sat. Dozed.

And before long, I was drifting down the Melatonin-soaked rivers of my restful mind. Warmth surrounds me, settles me and leads me down the hatch. The hatch felt like a. It felt like something distant, some thing, transient personality.

No one speaks of it. No one. Remembers?

I met a girl from Ipanema, but not the girl. She had memories, yes — locked in a prosaic state. Prosed stripped bare its meaning.

She welcomed me like the Captain, and offered me my wine —

Though no spirit had passed through me since one-nineteen eighty-nine.

It was a welcome. Her welcome.

She took me to a room. The hatch just ahead.

And there — flashes. Wounds.

Saline-heavy water draining everywhere.

As I opened the hatch, a disquieted rage filled my brain — not with action, but with passiveness. A surrender.

I reached in.

I felt my eye bulge, full of the same saline-heavy water that leaked from the wounds before.

My form began to shift.

To melt.

To forget its name.

A transient personality — once again.

Stubbornness dictates I retake the same pathway — again.

Sleep does not yield easily. It is difficult. Unrelenting.

Breathing shallowed into blurs. Blurs of the pathway, that leads me. Away from reason to abject gravel scrapes across the vitreous coating straight through the pupil, a bur hole, burn blast.

In the waking from the hatch. I see nothing but the daylight and its terror unleashed. The pathway is not quite remembered. Nothing is quite remembered.

Quiet remembered.

Pretend we pretend we pretend until we make pretend a trend.

As my eye flows with the saline-rich blood, the shock, shock, horror strikes me at my temporal lobes. I breathe, and then forget. Or that is the intention.

But unlike the many others who fall prey to the Girl from Ipanema, but not that girl. I survive to try and fight a failing battle.

I survive at night to fight in the light.

But what is survival if I am just keeping the inevitable at bay, until my arms burst open and my flesh is saline?

My fresh is flesh.

*

Thanks for reading!

Author's Notes: So, I fancied writing some horror, as it's been a while since I did a horror story, and this is what my brain came up with in a few hours. Publishing after editing. Not allowing it to percolate. So, yeah. Open to interpretation. Not autobiographical, specifically? Anyway. Horror. Enjoy.

Partial inspiration for partial fragments:

Here are other things.