I stretched myself mentally to the point of no return. The voices all around me seemed to enclose my inner being, caged it like an aggressive animal, and then poked at it with sticks heated with fiery embers. I was lost in myself as the world twirled about me aimlessly, and pointlessly. It was life amongst me. My daily torture… it had to end.
I fought to the day I broke. Shards of myself shattered in all directions leaving the bare infant of truth… how I wished for ignorance. I was the foreign bug set loose upon society. Left with nothing but truth I ambled effortlessly down the dark roads of mind and soul. Knowing what I was to find, fearing it, loving it, I walked stridently. With my head held higher than any hero I felt dead.
With death on my hands I knelt at the crossroads inside my heart. Truth stank up the air for it leaked from my every pore. There at the cross I was to meet my maker. The responsible party for my broken ignorance was to make an appearance, and to see what they’ve done.
Judgment was to be called upon me, so they say… so they say. Stepping past the blood trail of sins past I screamed to the “they” and demanded my solitude. Give me my bliss; my ignorant bliss I wailed. The wind of my soul was all to respond. The air was stagnating all around me like entrapped inside a dead man’s mouth. I begged, and I pleaded, but all that was given to me was the truth silently mocking me. The echoes of certainty pillaged my psyche raping any chance of achieving bliss. I cried to my maker, but it fell on deaf ears.
Yet I held tight to the sight of hope far off in the distance. I watched it dance over the horizon of my mind. With my eyes full of tears I fell to my knees… finally asking for forgiveness. It had to end I wept. A warm touch, like tips of a mother’s fingers, ran down my cheek right before a bright light flashed before my eyes. My chest heaved harshly as my back arched. My eyes cracked open and I was staring at a woman with a white button up shirt with blood covering it.
“Clear!” This woman said before she pressed two cold paddles on my chest sending vicious electrical waves through my body.
My eyes shot completely open and my blood drenched hand grabbed hers, my lips wavered for just the briefest of moments before I said, “Please, tell me I’m dead.”
“No sir, I just saved your life.” She said with judgment.
I laid my head back as her words, along with the ringing voices already there, danced devilishly inside my mind. I closed my eyes and I wept. I wept for the truth that would never leave, and I wept for the ignorance I would never see again.
My name is Bram Hayden. I was named after the man who created Dracula Bram Stoker himself. Although I am from the West Coast I am currently living in Omaha, NE. I spend my days as a lab technician at a plasma donation center, but at home is when I let loose the stories that build inside my head during the day onto the screen in front of me. To me, there is nothing better than putting the oddities you create in your human mind into words, and to share those words with others.