More than anything, she was flattered in her unearthly world. Quietly pleased that she had, in fact, created more devastation than she first suspected as she had lay bleeding, suffering and unattended to for a matter of years.
She thought it had just been her that broke. She thought it was just her who had died inside and was tasked with rebuilding what she thought had turned into a monster. It was like putting Frankenstein’s bride back together. None of the pieces fit, her insides were disfigured and she couldn’t find her heart anywhere. She looked everywhere… she parted the empty silence, lifted the damning emails, she scoured through the words which had been spat down broken telephone lines and she tried to charge the flat battery of her mobile phone with a weird kind of electroconvulsive therapy, watching it for signs of life. As she looked down at the chaos and the aftermath, through the stench of repugnant memories, none of them offering the hazy warmth and angelic honesty that they had previously promised, she realised that something evil had wormed its way under her skin, crawled through her blood stream and was cutting off her blood supply.
She lay, probably for three years (or more maybe) splattered by an acid attack, flesh she had shared so freely and perhaps wantonly festering with sores that wouldn’t heal. Think it was the living dead – whatever it was, Damien Rice, Adele and Snow Patrol clubbed together and helped her wallow, and every now and then, she mixed some Broken Hearted love songs into the soothing balm she tried to rub into her aching, throbbing head and eventually she invited My Chemical Romance in and she drank heavily at her own party, drowning her sorrows. That was how they described it. She preferred giving it a more realistic tag – alcohol dependency.
Every day, as was the necessity in life, she morphed out of the corpse lying prostrate on an unmade bed that had a million and one happier memories folded and creased into its fabric, and she masqueraded as someone who kind of knew what they were doing, grateful for the distraction of telephones ringing, and emails pinging and birds that were still singing. How strange. Every day, she thought, how strange… that life can go on so. It functions without love. How strange. She sat in front of the hairdressers and looked at herself in the mirror, a stranger smiling back. Am I going on holiday? When am I not going on holiday? Cue laugh. Cue small talk. Cue skating on the surface of very thin ice watching and waiting for the cracks to appear and cold, clammy hands to grab hold of her ankles and drag her back under.
Every night, she returned to the dark place, the smell becoming almost unbearable. She was propped up against the pillows, eyes closed tightly, because behind them there was a bit of light and she wanted to squeeze it out! She could still hear laughing, she could still taste food and feel the burst of flavour on her tongue, she could feel the blood coursing through her veins in a way that it never had, almost singing along its journey… reaching a crescendo of operatic proportions. She used to sing in the shower, used to love closing her eyes at night, opening them in the morning, counting the seconds, the minutes and the hours. Now, when she opened her eyes, the clock was just another reminder of the time ticking by… another hour… another day… another week… another month… another year… another season… another other, life, reminder… that it didn’t mean a thing to anyone.
And it never had.
She played out scenarios in her head – and she knew, as she was a monster – that she was capable of monstrous acts. She couldn’t verbalise them, they were so dreadful. But they involved fighting, and scratching and screaming at the top of a pair of lungs that were devoid of air. Her monster instinct was pulling at her hair in the middle of the night, urging her in a small devilish voice not to lie down and die as expected but to fight! She wanted to turn over and turn the voices down, she was a zombie, they were the walking dead and she wanted to walk with them. Having so much life and laughter and light had burned her eyes from the outside in and scorched everything she had to offer. She had laid it all out on a plate and watched as the devil scoffed it all down, making himself sick in the process. She hadn’t kept anything back. She had stood before him in full, monstrous glory and the monster in him had howled cleverly at the moon. They did the monster mash together, and it was a thriller!
She hadn’t realised he was bi-polar, or schizophrenic as they used to call it, with two personas and two different personalities – switching from one to the other to suit the environment. It was an eerie pair of traits that had gone undetected. She hadn’t used that as her excuse. She was just truly monstrous.
She spent every night with the cast of the Evil Dead, bits falling off, rotting slowly as time sped by, taunting her, never prepared to wait for her, chasing off into the future like a small child with a kite, looking back on his life, freed from the demons of his youth, shouting at her to catch him… urging her to keep up… and one day, maybe she will catch up with him. She can tell the big small child stories of monsters that might keep him awake at night. Or will he be too old by then? Is anyone ever too old to get his kite off the ground and watch it soar to the heavens and watch as it blows off course?
She mended though. Oh heaven, she looked up from hell and wanted out! She’d never been this far down before and it stank. The whole damn thing stank of broken dreams and promises, empty lives afraid to live, and everyone down here wore masks to hide their true identity, and every word that came out of their mouths was a lie, and they all deserved to live in the bowels of the earth for eternity. She didn’t. She was a monster, but she didn’t deserve the depths of this darkness and depravity. She made do and mended. She did it without pills, or potions or remedies, she worked through it in her head, she dabbed it with bourbon to stave off the infection, rationalised, made excuses, fostered regrets, sobbed in the dark, cried in the car, sniffed as flights took off and landed, emptied herself of it all, wrung it out like the dirty sheets she’d lain in, as the clock looked on accusingly, and sometimes amusingly, at the state of the monster she had become. She had been somebody else’s creation, and now she had to stick herself back piece by piece. She had sat for quite a while as an empty shell, the blood life sucked out of her by a huge, engorged leech. It had pretended that it could heal suffering, it promised to just eat the infection around the wound, but it grew so large and horrific that she just couldn’t stop it. Before she knew it, the slimy skin had engulfed her until she couldn’t breathe like she used to. It was a sickly disease.
She moulded herself into something she vaguely resembled and re-built the outside so that it was better and more durable – like a battery, every now and then she would feel that empty pull of gravity to remind her of the broken connection and she would drag herself to a dark place to lick her wounds and deal with the demons raging and screeching like banshees inside her head. It was madness. It wasn’t just two conflicting personalities it was the whole cast of The Living Dead dragging themselves around in her psyche.
The only way to deal with it was to float above the stench and look down, watching the years pointing and laughing at her in the distance, numbers ticking over, hands crawling round the face of time. As human fabric tends to do, when the will is strong enough and the heart willing, it all began to knit back together. She was once again standing monstrously tall and she knew that she had turned quite dramatically and horrendously into the Mistress of Invasion… ready for the next battle… scars healed and hidden. And she was pleased to see, from the evidence she had gathered that the demons were living on inside other heads… and she wanted to poke them hard and fast with the devil’s three pronged fork…
When she began the rebuilding process, she made sure she left out all of those human things that had caused her so much suffering in the first place. She stuffed them all in a box and shoved them in the loft where the bats lived. The Mistress of Invasion was ready and prepared to do battle again, whenever needed. At the back of her warped mind she knew that she had failed herself first time round, and she had allowed insincere words, the touch of a hypocritical hand and the heart of a devil to infiltrate her honesty and goodness. She wanted repentance and nothing less. She thought every day about the pain and suffering that had been inflicted on her, and she thought every day about how she would be vindicated, about how she would get her revenge. She never thought she would feel desire in quite that way again. All she knew was that she was much stronger now.
Just to be sure, in place of her heart, she stuck a ticking time box…a metal hand grenade… and it was only a matter of time before she pulled out the pin and tossed it back into the fray, blowing everything apart and all the heavenly world into a million tiny pieces.
Be afraid?
Be very afraid…
Mags Winthrop Blog 