The Writer’s Journal: A Short Story, Bolts of Lightening

Writer’s note: written 5/24/2020

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Bolts of Lightening

It would be a lie to say everything has been fine, so many of us are facing the same depths of our minds. We can see the inevitable truth seeping through each other’s porcelain smiles and shattered irises like a lightening bolt breaking across the darkest skies. 

When weeks of isolation leads you take an internal exploration, you visit the corners of your mind that only haunt you in your dreams. The eyes staring back at you from the depths look a lot like your own; blue and hazy, frantic and filled with what shimmers like excitement. It’s been awhile since you’ve dived this far.

You haven’t spoken out loud about this darkness since you were forced to face it some thirteen years ago. You adapted, you buried, you learned how to be as the others, to hide this part of you. 

You never explained it to your partner. Of course they’ve glimpsed your scars, traced the patterns across your wrists with delicate finger tips, soft brushes of their lips over the tattoo cover up, but they never asked more than once to know what happened. Was it because they too had scars, scars you couldn’t touch but you could feel? Feel in the way sometimes their embrace feels cold and their eyes are looking beyond the fold, their body ridged against yours when you move too quickly.

You sit there in your leather chair, debating the recent photograph’s worthiness to grace your square shaped digital reality. Your teeth are showing, it’s almost as if your face will decompose under the camera flash if you let go for an instant of this false enthusiasm. You think for a moment, could someone see it? See the cracks in your pupils & spot the depths below? 

You’re home alone for the moment. Alone with what’s been haunting you. A name dances across your memory with hot intensity. You see a familiar face. A face you once knew, but long to forget. Flashes of more memories flood in, raging with a deep passion you’ve forced down into the depths. 

Blood, tears, passion, love, obsession. It wrangles through the riverbed fighting over your other wounds. It demands to be seen, to be heard. Say my name. 

You refuse. 

If you say it three times will they suddenly appear? 

Another flash flood. 

Warmth, desire. Pain. 

You shuffle your playlist of music over, at this point you’ve closed your photos out of your screen, out of your mind. It’s too much to decide on right now. Maybe it’s the music drawing you back to the depths, whatever it is, it’s like wading through honey trying to crawl back out.

How easily it has been to gain weight and bury parts of you throughout your twenties. 

A little bit here, a little more there, all being buried further below. How was depression more acceptable in adolescence than in adulthood? Was it because solitude boldly silhouettes against the mask of maturity?

With your clothes in piles, you look for whatever is left of your soul. When did you trade in skulls for business casual? Was it somewhere along the trail of drinking away ... no. We won’t go there. 

Yes we will.

You shift in the chair, forward on. But no where to go. You shift back down. Sinking further back into the chair, back into the depths of darkness.

Maybe it was between the pills and the whiskey that you found your partner. Unintentionally. Oh, but so very much intentionally. The only unexpected part was when for now became forever.

Forever became acceptable and life became bearable. Was it conformity or love?

Bearable and happiness don’t typically dance, though we like to think they do. It’s when you sit alone long enough you begin to realize the happiness isn’t really true. 

And, you find yourself in the depths of the deepest corners of your mind. Chasing ghosts, chasing the parts that once made you whole. 

In isolation you’re supposed to find yourself. But what if you don’t want to? What if it’s not a version of you that you want to be found?

After all, how do you move on from something you left seven years ago unintentionally?

You spent the time to prioritize. You calculate. You focus on why you left in the first place instead of idealizing a falsehood that you built to rationalize toxicity. This version of you was never resolved, it was only buried under new, stronger feelings.

Chasing spirits down your arms, you follow them below the ink. 

It wasn’t suicidal, it was to feel again. It wasn’t an end, it was a numb, secluded desert that you couldn’t find your way out of. Blood moves quickly when your heart pounds heavier. It wasn’t healed, but you hid it well. 

When you let it slip from your sleeve, was it a part of you crying out for help? When you ran, you chose to stay instead. You needed help. Did the words ever make it to your lips? Denial. I’m not suicidal so I must be fine. 

It wasn’t a conversation, it was a demand, you were broken and needed to be fixed. Like a car engine. You were dropped off at the clinic as if you were being delivered to a repair shop. “Don’t return if not fixed”. But how do you fix something that doesn’t feel broken? How do you heal something that feels fine? 

You lie.

Because there is nothing to fix. This is it, it’s okay, your scars are fading slowly. You smile. You bury it down a bit more. How deep does this depth go anyway? The hazy blue eyes shift, they’ve lost you as you free fall.

In this depth of memory, you had accepted punishment now in new forms. Emotional. It feels right because it’s something to feel. After all, isn’t that all you’ve wanted for thirteen years, to feel?

Why don’t you respect me? Why am I not good enough? Why don’t you call me? Why don’t you come over?

Take me away, take me away, take me away.

And you do, you save yourself inside a bottle of pain killers. You drift inside your fuzzy seclusion. 

Remember when seclusion was your best friend? You spent your waking hours with it as often as you could. Here inside your isolation, it was easier to feel pain.

Does it matter what time it is? Your schedule says yes but you’ve been on since last night. Things are starting to become starkly orange and red, hues of reality shrouding your haze. THC and that makes three days since you’ve walked home sober. 

Blurs of trees and warm beer shuffle by as you shift and crash to the next level.

You shift again in your chair as you let yourself fall out of a window into the next memory.

You don’t want to remember these parts but they’re there bobbing up to the surface like floating pieces of plastic. They just won’t dissolve and disappear. You walk along the stream. This feels peaceful.

You begin to study your square life on your phone again. Scrolling with your memories to this time. 

Look how happy you were in those photos, so much skinnier, it was your prime. 

But you know better. You see past the smiles, you were drowning surrounded by people living. Although you occasionally screamed in the woods and chased darkness under the stars, it didn’t stop you from searching for more.

Was it in the whiskey that you finally lost her?

No, it was the whiskey, and the vodka and the “just drink it already”, skipping through hot reckless nights, skating on thin ice, with hopes she would swoop in and save you from yourself, to make you feel seen, to know she would be there to lick your wounds. To lick your neck. To twist and tangle your feelings as much as you do her sheets, but night after night you went home alone. Face first onto your own bed, into the toilet bowl.

No, you never could lose her in your subconscious, though. She was always there, waiting. Always there in your nightmares.

She finally admitted that she felt it when you let go into that pool that summer. You dipped, and dipped again, deeper. Floundering, trying to force her out of you by taking in waters of new. Reckless and fearless. Each after the other more brazen than the last. Then, as sudden as a rip tide moves, she pulled you back in, in smoke clouds and empty promises that you accepted gleefully as you pushed back against the wall, back into her, back into denial because it felt safer than isolation, felt better than the pools, felt better in the dark, lit only by the television glare.

You could feel again. 

You shove closed the square, opening another. Jumping ahead on your Rolodex of time. 

You remember this moment clearly. It was pitch black under the tress. You couldn’t see each other well unless one of you shifted under the moon light. You felt the vibrations of your high tingling across your senses. Passion was one of your best games together, you just proved that three times. She burned you with a cigarette accidentally, a jumbled mess of sharing too many things at once. The sting felt good, grounded you as you began to float towards the sky. It was one in the morning on a warm summer day. The air was thick with denial. You swore to yourself this was the last-last time, again. 

Until four months later. 

Until your unintentional became infinitely and you realized when, in the harsh rays of the sun, sober for a week, exhausted, and frightened to face her unexpectedly. She reached out and touched you and it no longer ignited the spark, you were too afraid of the jump.

Was this release? Was this what it felt like to be over? Was this a new level of numb?

You box back up this part of you. This severed piece of your soul. You fold it tenderly around her image. Around the faint memories of touch and smell. You dig a shallow grave, because even if you want to let go, something lingers along the shadows watching. She’s always in your subconscious. 

In this depth of you, down this hole, there are more of these boxes. Boxes of once was and no mores. You walk over them carefully, back towards the surface.

You have to wade through a dense forest, it draws you in closer. With sharp bushes reaching out. This part is harder to push through without feeling scratched. This part...this part holds death. 

You rather go back to tracing your scars just above the riverside, you rather announce to the world you’re still broken than to face this section. 

But here you are, scratched, tender. Waves of warmth flood you. A light flickers above, somehow you aren’t at the bottom of the well anymore but you’re just outside of it.

He’s there, waiting for you. Wrinkled with time but frozen in memory.

You’ve always wondered, now that he’s gone, does he suddenly know what you’ve done? Is he somewhere in another realm, the second journey of the soul, judging you?

No, of course not. He’s known all along and he never loved you any less.

Does it make it worse knowing he knew?

Depression can make you feel like it’s better to stay under than try to pull yourself over, and you felt that more than you realized back then. 

You see it now, standing in that warm light. How much you hid from him, hid in shame.

He knew your flaws. He knew what you’d done. What you did at night. He knew when he looked into your eyes. He saw your pain, he saw the cracks for what they were, he saw your heartache and held you through it. He didn’t send you to a repair shop, he didn’t question your groggy hangover, or withdrawals. He saw it, he saw you and he saw himself in your eyes. 

You lost him physically but you carry him inside your soul, inside your memories, You let him mostly run free in there, inside where you are now looking back at each other. He helps you heal. He helps you find yourself when you get lost in the depths.

Today, he guides you away from the depths as he often does.  He wasn’t going to leave you down there. No, it’s time to go back to the current.

The photo with the fake smile, the face of deception, fits perfectly into the timeline of all the others.

Caption. Post. Let go. 

Bolts of lightning sparkle just beyond your iris.

You emerge from the chair just as your partner opens the front door. They won’t notice you’ve been following ghosts. They won’t notice the cracks in your foundation, they never have.

You wouldn’t be lying if you said you’re mostly fine, but you’d be lying if you said you didn’t feel the sorrows of loss anymore. Loss of him, of her, of yourself.

Bolts of lightening strike hot across the depths of your darkest skies.

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Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

M.E.