I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. Thoughts swirled around in my head like the ingredients of a fruit smoothie in a blender. Lights flashed before my eyes in this dark room. Sweat seeped off my chest and pooled underneath me. My feet were icy cold and I couldn’t tell where my hands were. Pain impulses that should have been sent from my knees and back were ignored as my mind screamed, “God, Help me!”
I turned to look at the clock. 12:14 glowered at me in green fluorescent numerals from across the room. Five hours til my first alarm alerts me of work. I hadn’t the energy to think about that.
All I could do was listen as the thoughts separated into their constituent parts. Thoughts as loud as the storm that would crash in the sky in the future bombarded my mind before making room for the next one. They were like a disorderly courtroom or the din of quarreling subjects before the throne of a young, untested prince.
What was the circumstances that triggered this, you may ask? I read a word in a sentence not minutes before and now the possible implications roared through my head. It’s better that I not repeat the word to avoid a similar episode. These are thoughts in overdrive amid tossing and turning and silent screams. I recall writing about a storm of thoughts, which appears in a chapter of my book but this is a little different. This word might only be heard in the dreaded passages of Gnar-Angrith or the savage evil of Urkkarth.
I don’t ever want to be implicated or associated with this word; it’s a state I can never find myself in.
I tossed and turned and fought and wrestled. Whispered pleas escaped my lips and fell on a silent dark, empty room. “Help me!” I know not when total exhaustion overtook me, only that it was the only thing that stopped the madness. I was jarred awake by the loudest storm I’ve ever heard. Again, I stared at the clock reading 4:49. The outdoors peered in the tiny sliver of my window, but its noise shook me.
Today, I’ve only sort of recovered and my body stubbornly objects to my every move. It’s like all the messages of pain my brain refused to acknowledge last night were back logged to resurface today. I’m running on fumes.
“We are all foolish Puppets who, desiring to be kings, now lie pitifully crippled after cutting our own strings.” Randy Stonehill