The monster under my bed; I am afraid. As night trickles like rivulets of water carved through the soil, time etches and ebbs through the mirage of porcelain glass skin. And I am still afraid. My sweat, like tributaries of a river, carving their crossroads out to the ocean, before they dissolve. The rumble of the witching hour, the creaks in the floorboard beneath my bare, stricken feet. Ticking of a clock somewhere, perhaps better described in past tense. The yellow light that casts a hue upon my room, the heart of an underworld that teems and writhes like worms beneath my fingertips. A word that I cannot say, something that I cannot let out of its cage. A feral animal.
And so I have kept it caged. And I have kept it caged – a menagerie underneath my bed. A grandiose, spectacular, freakshow. Within the cage: restraints. And within the restraints: words that I cannot speak of in the crevices between clenched teeth. There is a reason why we keep secrets. There is a reason why we do not open pandora's box. There is a reason why when things die, we bury them in the ground. Some at six feet. Some far beyond that. And that's where my monster lies.
I am afraid, I am afraid.
But I know, deep inside, that am not afraid of the monster underneath my bed.
Sometimes, I tuck the covers away in the dead of the night to have a peek. I poke my head down underneath – the entire Earth that I know, turned on its axis. And I look at the darkness underneath my bed.
There she is.
From this angle, from this light: a sad creature. Slumped against metal handcuffs that I refuse to unlock. Wrists burnt and bruised from the struggle for freedom. But in the end, there is always a power greater than the want for happiness: the fear of failure.
Sometimes, she relents and stills from her fight.
"Don't you want to be free?" I whisper, holding myself back, afraid she might jump out at me. Devour me. But she replies to me only in glossy eyes fixated on a space somewhere and nowhere at all. She does not look at me.
The worst thing is this: I want to free her but I can't. Sometimes, when she thrashes around in her cage, I sit down on the cold floor next to her and pry at the lock holding her in. I want to free her; sometimes, I think she wants to free me. I hear her say the things that I cut myself off from saying. The unfinished parts of my sentences that I hold in. The actions that society has shaved off from my unpolished, childish self. Things that we shouldn't do, things that we shouldn't say to be liked. To be a mirage of your messy, genuine self. In the fossilised remains of my current body, all I have left is a reservedness that I cannot fathom as myself. Some days, it feels like a jigsaw – I've dissociated so far into two that pieces don't click back into each other and my brain puts up so many barriers that the thoughts tire out before they reach my mouth. And then I forget how to be whole again.
The monster under my bed.
YOU ARE READING
Stagnant
General Fiction[ collection of things that never really fit, short stories, poems, whatevers ] Things that could be so much more, and yet churned to a stop.
