You walk into a haunted house, but instead of ghosts or vampires, you get this. This house is a living nightmare. A very old television set plays and replays your worst moments that you can’t ever turn off, and on the ceiling there are eyes that look like something a child drew but actually judge your every move very harshly. There’s old drawings with filled color and sunshine, on the floor next to shattered glass. But the mirrors are still there, on every wall. You look at them and see an ugly monster every time. The floor is as fragile and as cold as ice, so you tiptoe everywhere because you don’t want another thing to break in your life. It’s terrible in here but it’s better than whatever may be out there. Besides, there is no way out. But it’s okay, because once you get used to the darkness and your body adapts to being cold, outside it will be too bright, too hot. You’ll get used to the taste of ####, or the taste of nothing. The scale may say that your heart is too heavy, so you’ll always have to leave it there every once in a while, watching as it pumps the blood out onto the floor instead of your body, so that you can feel nothing for once. Once it is just the right size, but not quite dead, you take it back and repeat the same process once again. The blood pumps through your body back into your heart, but your brain always pushes more and more stress onto it and wears it out, gives it weight. When the heart is not in your body, it is disconnected from your brain. You want to take your brain out of your head but your skull is too thick, as thick as the walls of the house. So your brain will always run, gathering pressure from the eyes, from the very state of the house, thoughts as trashed as the floor and the table and your bed. There’s stick and mess everywhere, it’s stained on and no matter how much you try to wash it off, it will not leave, so you have to stare at it until your eyes burn and you have to close them for a long, long time. Only then will your brain be quiet. But once you wake up, it is all the same. You hear the only audio that plays in this home, that high pitched cry from the basement. You can’t unlock the door, though. No matter how hard you try. It haunts and chills you to the bone. You constantly have to plug your ears just so the sound doesn’t shatter you, wondering why it is so disturbed and how it got that way. You search your house day and night, looking at its history. Decaying records on the bookshelf, but something is always missing. There was nothing wrong with anything that happened, it seems. Maybe something didn’t happen that should have. You don’t know what it is and you will never figure it out. You’ll never have the powerful knowledge you need in order to unlock that door or clean the stains or turn off the TV or close the eyes or fix the floor or the glass or see something human in the mirror, and sometimes, that is your deepest desire. Other times, you’re lying on the floor with open arms, naked and insecure with a hole in your chest and your heart bulging outside of it, ready for whatever this house holds to take you. Mold. Dust. The TV’s visuals or that terrible cry or sharp glass poking into your skin, the discomfort of the icy cold floor. Anything painful, because it’s the best way to live and the best way to die.
