Word.Vignette

I crept slowly down the cold granite path, edging closer and closer to the doorway to my home. My feet sensed the difference between the light and shadow, their tentative steps creating an echo that made me feel comforted, as though another was walking alongside me. My hand, trembling, stretched towards the handle, and froze. My heart throbbed unpredictably like a strobe light, and my throat constricted so tightly it felt as though a rope was strangling me. I stopped, not because I wanted to, but because my legs refused to move. This sound. This was the sound that controlled me, as though I was a jerking marionette. Beyond the heavy, wooden, closed door, beyond the music pounding through my ears, beyond my determination not to listen, I could still hear them. Hear their screams, the taunting, the fury, the niggling. All the more clear was the pointlessness, and, more intimately, the hurt. My hurt, my torment, my anxieties. All the pain I endured, and, for what? Why? It had nothing to do with me. There was no way out. No possible way out. I was standing before my dungeon, the dungeon that imprisoned my heart.

I opened the door, and the torrent of sound hit me like a bullet. This sound, this memory, that haunted my dreams, haunted my reality.

There I was, falling backwards into a smooth cream wall, which emitted no more comfort or warmth than a dentist’s office. There they were, placed on two chairs around a square table. Eyes flashed, mouths clashed, all the while, their body’s jerking like a devil fighting with an angel. I was separate from them. I was alone, left to my thoughts. Within my head, another battle raged. This battle was one that could not be won, but was the result of constant tussles.

“Bang, crash!”, there was my dad, sarcastically impersonating his idea of the sound of Mum’s washing up. My head tilts in a silent scream- Shut up!!!, but he doesn’t hear those meaningful words, and my mouth doesn’t open to say them. I watch on, life moving in slow motion. I watch his eyes narrow, the mouth open, and close again as though his mouth was mechanical. I can’t hear him. I don’t want to hear him. Words are harmless, but the intention, that’s the real weapon. That intention was what tortured me, like a dagger stabbing through me, again, and again, and again.

I walk uneasily to my bedroom. The happy times hung mockingly on the wall- smiles that right now, seemed so long ago. I hear the door slam in the distance, the glass windows shaking, and the swearing that results in the kitchen.

Silence. Dead silence. It’s my fault. Now there is nothing. No love, no communication, numb feeling, numb hurt. Nothing but hurt.