It’s brutal to be stuck where I am. I am a mass of contradiction. To be stuck in this ebb, and still feel the pressure building, building with no outlet, no release - no valve to cut it off. I am cold, but turbulent. I know at any moment it could break, and I want it too, to find my own way out of this tunnel in my head. It is the first rush that keeps it back, keeps the walls containing it to grow higher and higher until the water is so far above my head, that I look at the dying sunlight like a drowning person sinking further into the murk.

I want it to end. I want the explosion that will come even as I fear what this tide will bring. I’ll take the neutrality - the constant back and forth if only I could avoid the surge that precedes it.

No outlet. I look for what I’ve forsaken, cursing myself as I do for being weak. I need the sharp edge, wish it could be wielded by someone I didn’t have to worry about hurting. It is a restlessness contained by my skin and my cold intellect. My eyes I keep down on the paper in front of me, staring over their heads when they speak and cast in sideways glances. They simply tell too much and I don’t want their sympathy either.

They don’t fucking understand it.

She does. I want so badly to crawl back to her, and fear doing so would crush the reasons she ever loved me in the first place. My strength. It isn’t physical; it’s mental.

I’ve left myself nothing. In this hour, I feel it. God I feel it.

‘Stay still.’ I said, pressing my hand to her lower back. ‘Stay still, or you’ll end up in the hospital, explaining why you’ve allowed me to beat you.’

She smiled and turned her head, being careful to keep her back from moving. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘Let’s not relive that event.’

I pressed the edge of the scalpel to her back and pressed it in until her flesh yielded and blood welled up. I drew it back, like a child would upon a crayon, in a neat line that flicked up at the end. I glanced up at her face, saw the tears that slide across the bridge of her nose. I heard her sniff slightly, but ever vigilant about the stillness of her back.

I repeated the action on her back, this line running fractions away from the angry mark of the first. The blood began to blur the lines, hide them under a thick flow of crimson. I ran my gloved hands over the cuts, resisted the urge to taste her on my fingertips. It was barely contained, the urge. I wanted it badly enough that my chest felt tight with the compulsion.

I touched her again and she flinched violently. My gaze slid back to her face. She gave a watery laugh and hid her face in the fold of her arms. Her voice was muffled, ‘It’s getting hard.’

I laughed softly, but paused in my next cut. ‘How did you know?’

She laughed, but the sound was cut off in pain as her back stirred the cuts. Blood stirred again, flowed that much more from the cuts. The urge was strong. I grit my teeth.

My thick breath was obvious and she looked at me carefully. ‘Enough for today, D.’

‘Enough?’

‘Just for today.’

I lowered my hand and nodded my head. I dropped the blade onto the small tray with a clink. My gloved fingers returned to the cuts and I stroked them almost lovingly. They were stained with her blood when I pulled them back, coated thickly in the stuff.

‘I love watching you bleed.’ I mumbled it, almost to myself.

She couldn’t move until I had bandaged the wounds and knew it. I was in no hurry. No hurry.

I brought my fingers to my mouth and smeared the crimson across my mouth. I felt it settle in my body like alcohol. I could feel the ease that settled into my muscles. I was drunk, high, on her essence. My lids felt heavy. My body hummed.

I was consumed.

Fiction, of course. Dark fiction. Not a pretty story.

(more…)

‘It’s the ebb.’

It is an insufficient answer, but does manage to gather it all together. Perhaps in my writing I’ve demonstrated the ebb, or left trace that you’ve picked up upon. Those around me know it. It’s the killing cold, or rather the numbing beauty of sameness - balance unbroken by passionate thought.

I call it the ebb. It fits. Tides rush in, they recede - nature fades from summer to winter, pausing only sometimes for breaks in between, a delicate balance before summer heat or winter cold takes over. I’ve often wondered if I, too, break for the seasons - but I, however, am not so disciplined as nature and find no schedule upon which to depend. It comes and breaks upon me.

Days. Weeks. Months. Years.

It is no depression where everything becomes effort, or thoughts of my departure from Earth begin to sound good. I just cease to feel as deeply. My passion evaporates like a well running dry - able to sustain only drops, where before there was a flood.

In this time, I gather great amounts of unfinished - creative - works, and they sit until I delete them in disgust, or the flow resumes. Work, it does not suffer. Although there is less of it, blissfully, it thrives in this period where budget cuts become easier to do and people become just a little more expendable.

I would tell you that I long for an evenness and it would taste a lie. Sometimes the comfort of great anger, or great indifference is soothing - there is warm comfort in the heat of rage; cool relief in the filters that leave only indifference. In evenness there is uncertainty. In uncertainty, fear.

I loathe uncertainty, and I fear that which I am capable - when passion compels, or logic demands constantly, back and forth. Not knowing the answer. Not predicting ahead. Changing like a breeze. If I depend on no one but myself, in that tide, who serves as my compass?

Maybe it is fear. Maybe bravery is reserved for those who don’t predict risk weeks -no, years- in advance. I must know. In the ebb, I am my compass I know how I will react. In the excess, I am my compass, I know how I will react.

In both, the balance - I am afraid of it.