The Damned – Part 1

I’m not good at things.

That’s just fact.  Strip everything else away, and the simple fact remains that my life is hard predominately because I make poor decisions and am generally bad at things.

Some days I can push through the bad.  Some days I can overcome the feelings of anger and despair at having to struggle at everything I try to be good at.  At everything I love to do.  Some days I can make the demons leave.  I can brush them from me like the wisps they are, as solid daylight of competence blows them into dust.

Other days are today.  Other days I realize that no matter how I try, what I want will most likely remain out of reach.  I am frustrated at everything around me, but mostly that is just projection.

Mostly I am frustrated at myself, practically all the time.  I’m not smart enough, I’m not good enough.  I don’t have enough ability, enough judgement, enough tenacity, enough anything.  I am simply not enough.  I know deep in my bones that one day the weight of that knowledge will break me.  I will be beaten down that final time, and I will not get up.  Life is not an anime or a manga.  Some things do not get stronger with punishment.  Some clay rejects the kiln.

Each time I am here, I pray that the day is not today.  I hope and struggle, willing myself to get back up.  To stay in the fight, and give it one more attempt.  I try to lean in, to let the pain of my struggles give me focus and motivation.

Today I have stood back up, and that’s all I have right now.  So I’ll just have to make that good enough.

The Damned – Part 1

The pain rampaged through me, a thousand needles scoring my insides with each torturous beat of my heart.  It consumed me, molten metal flowing in my veins instead of blood.  I screamed, though I don’t remember starting the sound.  I joined the spirit of the sound soon enough, adding emphasis and effort to the base reaction.

Seconds crawled, each as slow as a glacier, as long as an ice age.  Still my world was agony.  Still my world was a million pinpricks of acid, scouring me away into nothingness.  five… six…

The molten metal became lava, became the sun.  I was nothing anymore, simply one raw, exposed nerve which was surrounded by fire.  I was on the floor, jerking and twitching spasmodically as I lost all rational thought, turned to tinder in the fire.

nine…. ten….

Then, the inferno stopped.  It didn’t ease, didn’t abate slowly.  Upon reaching ten, it was gone, banished by the simple act of adding a double digit to the seconds of my suffering.  I lay weeping, choking, gasping, retching.  Slowly, I peeled myself back from the edges of madness, placing each mental step with the caution of navigating a minefield.  It was slow work, made more so by the scars of my previous attempts.  Done wrong, I could find parts of myself simply missing, cast away as neatly as though they had never been.

Gently… gently….

I worked diligently, and when I had gathered all the pieces that were left of me, I began sewing them together.  Memory was my thread, the sharp lack of pain my needle.  Where the pain had been, the burned remnants of self served as cloth.  With time, and too much practice, the fabric began to reveal the person I was.  The person I still am, by some accounts.

I could breathe again, without whimpering or wheezing.  I could remember things too.  My name came first, as it always did.  It was faded and splotched, a piece of steel burned again and again until it had begun to fade despite it’s strength.  The lettering could just be read however, and I was once again Jessica Hartwell.

It was not a comforting revelation.  Jessica Hartwell had a horrible existence, lived at the edges of society in a way that few ever did and survived.   I knew as well that it would take me in the end, that one day the pain would come and I would not be able to find all the pieces, or the concentration needed to sew them together into a person once more would fail me.  I would become nothing more than a drooling wreck on the floor.  Another vegetable to populate the farms full of ones such as I would become.

That day was not today however, so I stood up, gathering the towel I had placed on the small box in the abandoned warehouse I used whenever it was time to take my medicine again.  I wiped myself off, cleaning the bile and sweat and dribble which had coated me in a thin layer of ooze, and dressed with the neat efficiency of those who had given up on caring about fashion.  Eventually, I was ready to face the world.

The last thing I grabbed was my eye.  It was on a leather strap which I wore around my head at all times of the day.  I adjusted the strap until it had taken its place on the left side of my face, the ritual marks along the leather cording gleaming bright despite the darkness.  The demonic soul, or at least that part of it which existed within the eyeball I had borrowed without permission, was still safely trapped within.  I smiled a little as I settled it into place, and the world once more shifted into the clarity that only The Damned could see.

It was time to make a difference.

To be continued…

Painfully,
Justin