Shame?

Yeah, I know the place

It's where the gaslighting narcissist tucked me away

To die slowly

As she used words like venom

To pump in my veins

Until I'm sick with insanity and rage

I can't sleep

I can't eat

Yet I can't lay awake either

My every move

Every breath a most heinous offense

To the cannibal disguised as a practicing therapist

The gaslighting narcissist loves a strenuous game

But not the same you and I play with our friends

This game begins without our consent

Of course you guessed at your own expense

Unlike a gamble, you don't stand a chance

Not against the gaslighting narcissist

We were all sitting around the campfire on my church grounds when it happened. This particular evening was prime for a gathering such as this. One of those fall days where it’s not quite cool enough for a heavy coat and the heat from the fire is sufficiently warm. A Michigander’s paradise. It came on suddenly, while I was mid-strum on the Ibanez I was now clutching with the same intensity I was using to will the contents of my bowels to remain where they were. I could feel everything rapidly dropping into my lower intestine. The taco bell I had prior had decided to aggressively protest proper digestion, now racing for the nearest exit. Given what taco bell does to most people, anyone might say that I should’ve seen this coming. The reason I didn’t is that for as long as I’ve existed, I have been able to devour anything edible without so much as a hint of adverse reaction. I was notorious for having a steel gullet and would sometimes joke that my digestive tract could compete with any of the world’s major scavengers. That was, until now. I’ve pulled more than my share of knives from my backside after many failed relationships with ex boyfriends and ex friends, but no betrayal had ever struck me such as the one that was just administered by my own body. Something I thought I knew as well as my own soul. I jumped to my feet, sprinting to the porter jon that was clear across the grounds, exposing a secret I had managed to keep since I retired from cross country in the Fall of my senior year of high school. Thankfully, I was able to salvage my pants but I made my way back to the fire slowly, trying to delay the inevitable. The laughter was still going strong when I got back. Not because it was obvious to everyone that I had nearly shat my pants but because everyone just discovered how ridiculously stupid I look while going at a full sprint. Something I hadn’t been heckled for since my last cross race. See, a cross country race is 3.1 miles in distance. The last ‘point one,’ is when you’d use your body’s last stores of energy by unleashing the most speed you could muster after cranking out three miles. While I was well built for pacing myself through long distances, I was not cut out for sprinting and it showed at the end of every race. My coach would joke about how I would become unglued as I lost control of my flailing appendages in pursuit of that finish line. Something I was relieved to bid farewell when I finished my running career, and something I would not have anticipated to be the subject of more jests and laughter after over a decade of silent retirement. Man, I’m never going to live this down.

It was raining outside

But the clouds parted in my mind's eye

Letting through a shaft of light

A white light that burned magnificent

With the hot intensity of a one thousand watt bulb, in the cranium of someone who just had an epiphany

And I knew...

As I laid my awkward glance upon you for the first time

I knew who you were

You were the verse to the melody that's moved me since my first days on this earth

Then my heart whispered to my head

This moment,

This moment right here is already a memory

A sliver of significance

Illuminating the caverns of my mind

Filed to my thought archives

Between the folds of my gray matter

Within molecules of time

Fused to the very atoms of O2 and carbon dioxide

With each rise and fall of my chest

You have become my first and last breath

From now until death

Every trial and test in between

I want nothing more than to be where your ends meet

And not just on the days

When the silk of white rose petals kiss the bottoms of my feet

And warm vanilla fills the air

But even on the days when you can't stand to look at me

Our words become the last grains of sand

In the spent half of the hour glass

Yes

Even then

Even when

My best is less than sufficient

Even when

We don't speak before bed and the sun rises on sour emotion that's been incubating since the night before, you see

Even the sweetest melody catches days off its beat

We slur the words to our verse

Hardship and victory will change the sound of the song that we make

But even then baby

It will still be okay

Insomnia: medical condition or seemingly the most intimate hell, tailor made to fit an individual. I use the word “intimate” because while sleeplessness affects many, the experience tends to be unique and personal to each insomniac. For me, it’s not a disorder or another restless night. It’s the place I visit more than any sane person would ever care to , and it only exists between the hours of 1 and 5AM. From bed, I disappear into the textured ceiling tiles, a sea of small bumps, splotches and imperfections, until I’ve drifted into contemplation. Pondering the increasingly real possibility of the notion that nothing exists beyond those tiles. Nothing beyond those tiles or the five walls that enclose me. Yes, I said five walls. Before you begin to picture an abnormally shaped bedroom, let me state that the fifth wall is a barrier that I created with and in my mind. Strategically placed to stifle the flow of logic during these trivial hours of the early morning. This, my friend, is true time travel, as many days pass within this window of several hours. They pass without a sound. A silent death. A passage. You’re leaving this world without so much as a ripple in the wet foot print at the mouth of your shower. Not even a draft down the corridor when the door slams upon your exit, as if you never were. Aimless thoughts wander and weave between pressed folds of gray matter: “I think, therefore I am.” An arguement that I pose with the late Descartes while I wonder if I am just the product of someone else’s dream. Who could dream such a dream? So elaborate and intricate that one could live an entire life within it. Why, he would have to be a god. Then reality is not this life I live. Truly, it is the seventh day. When God wakes from His rest, all of the wondering, pondering, confusion and strife that I’ve claimed as my life will cease as dreams do when their dreamers come to.

Despite this fact floating in a sea of the sobering realities of a fallen world, I couldn't understand what she had against my trying to live the rest of my life as functionally as one possibly can without the use of both legs. Hidden in the caverns of my heart would always be a great sorrow for the loss of our parents and a growing list of "what if's", alternate scenarios and quiet moments I'll spend wondering what would've happened had I done something differently. But I didn't, and there was nothing I could do to change that. After tucking those restless thoughts away with the others in the archive, I turned off all of the lights and peered through the blinds, making sure that her sedan had disappeared from view before getting ready. While she had spent the time since the tragedy going off the deep end, I had been plotting. You might think that suddenly becoming confined to a chair with very limited mobility would drive anyone to the brink of some type of existential crisis, but in my case... Well, I found it convenient in the way of making time to do lots of reading and research. At first I just wanted these men that killed my parents to taste justice that our police forces and the law were too inadequate to serve up, but after years of climbing the secret hierarchy within the underbelly of Queens, New York, I had acquired quite a bit of power. I had gone from selling some of my adderall and clonipin to some friends to fund the search to a king pin with the means and authority to have these men killed when I finally found them.