Ashes − 20 May, 2007
The laughing had stopped, and I could feel reality closing in on me, its cold hands tightening its grip around my throat. I felt as if I was surfacing from the black pits of the ocean, and I was terrified that I might see the sun again. I wanted my escape. I wanted to be lost inside the haze and never be found. At the same time, I wanted out. I wanted to be free of this hell, this miasma of pain and despair that was choking me. But I was trapped somewhere in between, lost inside a self-inflicted purgatory.
The others sat around me, as meek and afraid as the children they were trying so hard not to be. I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab them all and yell, “Why? Why are you doing this to yourselves? Can’t you see you’re miserable?” But I merely slumped in my seat, as if bad posture alone could save me.
Life itself had become ashes around my feet. My entire existence had been boiled down into something as significant as the bug that met its end against the windshield. I hated everything: my friends who spoke love with one side of their mouth and self-interest and selfishness with the other; my life and the sense of futility and pointlessness that had arisen since I decided to quit school; but more than anything I hated myself. Loathing rose inside me, sick and vile, for every mistake that I had ever made, for my failures, for my frustrating inability to be happy even for one day.
I was losing my mind.
Suddenly, I felt the car jerk to a stop. I struggled from my seatbelt and into the cold air. As the wind hit me, I took a deep breath and felt as though I were being lowered back onto the earth. Everything had become manageable again, and silently I swore never to put myself through anything like that again.
Before the night was over with, I’d be clawing my way up from the depths of the beast’s gullet yet again, vowing that things would be different next time…
