My Killer

Destiny

Usually when you wake up after a particularly rough night out on the town cotton dryness is the distinct sensation lining the walls of your mouth like a piece of a worn-down tapestry, foul, simply fucking foul. You can most definitely taste the ancient rot, the mold, it's there, unavoidably there.

My mouth, on the other hand, didn't feel like it had been swabbed relentlessly by a dry ball of cotton, it wasn't a piece of worn-down tapestry. No, the taste and soreness were a lot fouler than that. Bile rested in the back of my throat like an ever-present vulture, just waiting for me to keel over before attacking. The top of my tongue was coated in this dry flaky acid, distinctly sour-tasting, and I could barely swallow due to the raw sandy sensations which made each breath feel like a shallow gasp. Constantly gasping, like a fish left on dry land to slowly suffocate. Sure, there was oxygen available, within reach, and still, it felt as if it wouldn't fill my lungs, like I just didn't have the right set of organs for that particular task. Only, I wasn't a fish, I was very much human, a human that was drowning on land. Or at least, that's what it felt like. My breaths having become mere shallow gasps.

Ugh...

Gods...

The led-infused lids of my eyes were firmly crusted which imposed the impossible idea that I had been stuck in bed for several weeks, never truly able to wake, barely existing at all.

I hadn't. That was not the case.

Through an overly conscious effort, I raised a shaking hand up to rub painstakingly gently against the heavy lids.

...urts...

So fucking heavy, just like the suffocating weight that lingered in every fiber of my being, heavy and sore. I was very much awake, or at least somewhat awake, but this slurred sense of being drenched every movement and thought, which with a furious determination, managed to claw its way to the surface despite the slurred state I found myself trapped within. It was almost as if everything was coated in this thick slimy barrier that had to be broken through. Again, and again, and again. It just wouldn't go away. Slime stuck to everything and I had to fight the sticky substance just to merely exist, to be, to breathe.

I blinked.

And I blinked.

And I blinked again, and again, and again.

The heavy lids which dragged themselves up and down over the slight curve of my needle-poked orbs left this rawness in their wake, almost as if I had just taken a razor and dragged that over the blurred orbs and not actually done something quite natural, blink my eyes. But despite the tormented discomfort I just couldn't halt that natural action, I blinked, and I blinked, and I blinked some more. Each raw movement adding just a pinch more moisture to the swollen mass my eyes had seemingly become while I... while I... slept?

..I ...fell asleep...?

When... how... wh...?

The dimmed light from the overhead light fixture illuminated the study I attempted to take in through the narrow slits my barely-parted lids had managed to create, and at the same time, those destructive rays of light burned my eyes to crisps.

Gods... it ...ucking hurts...

I was on fire, it burned. Everything that had to do with my eyes fucking hurt.

It hurt, not in how getting stabbed by a kitchen knife would hurt, but rather the dulled-down, yet very much aware kind of hurting one would get from constantly poking at recently wounded flesh with the tip of one's own index finger. Sore, tender, with a dull-pounding echoing alongside every single beat of my heart, constantly adding that migraine-like throb into the nasty mix of subdued pain I found myself within.