l'esprit de l'escalier

At first I thought I was dreaming. The type you don't want to wake from. The type where you know something is waiting for you on that other side of the curtain. It started with the smell of the ocean. Salt, rotting detritis floating across the surface.

When my feet touched frigid lapping water it sent a shock through my body. Sat on a pathetic twin bed, last night's piece of meat laid across one side of it. the sound crashing waves muffled by the dry wall and the rapidly rising water seeping through the dark oak floorboards. Is this hell? Purgatory? It felt familiar.

Somewhere far older. The icy water was soaking my mattress and yet I sat still, eyes somewhere in the mid distance that didn't exist. The sound of cracking glaciers rolled over me like thunder from some far off approaching storm. As that crystal blue water rose the floor dissappear in a darkness that moved through the water like smoke through air.

“Are you happy?” The voice was familiar, like a friend from highschool you can't remember the name of. I tried to respond but nothing came out, I wanted to plead with the voice, beg for answers but that was not a luxury I was gifted in these moments.

“Do you think she is?” My eyes flowed from the water to the nearly covered mattress to the bare pale skin like a stone of flesh on the coast of my regrets.

I wanted to explain why. Why it was her, and why it was me. Why I fell in love with something I should of never had. again, not a word came from my lips.

The darkness below the currents shifted. there was no floor, I could see the flickering of two massive green eyes that contrasted the blacks and blues of my rising doom. It was her face. I rolled the lifeless little thing over on her back. A gaping hole left where a face should be, only the top of her skull and her lower jaw and slack tongue.

“Tell me what you did.” I wasn't a weak woman and it was only now did tears start to fall down my cheeks and into the filling salty tomb I was in. The gargantuan eyes shifted, pupils the size of car tires focused solely on me, on the bile rising in my gut, like even it wanted no part of me. I could feel the words I wanted to say stuck somewhere between my lungs and my tongue, slithering back and forth like an agitated centipede. I just needed to say them, to speak the words and the water would lower, the face and the body would all go with it. Anything to make the water I wrought receed.

Neck deep, standing on top of the bed. the body of my regret still flat against it, like it was without buoyancy. I fought against my own lungs as if I was already drowning, dying from something that was not even here yet. The bed slowly slipped below the top row of the faces teeth, the floor a distant memory. It was just my frantic wading motions above the ungodly face this place wore.

I began to kick faster as my hands began to tear at my chest, my neck, all the soft parts I could let my nails sink into. The kicking wasn't enough, I began to sink the water around me filling with bright red. I could feel every inch of flesh that pulled free from me, like a hangnail, pulling off in strips. I just wanted the words to come out. To die with them held on my tongue would some how be worse. Two fingers pushed through my delicate, soft neck like wet tissue paper a rush if relief. I was sinking still deeper, there was no room anymore, it was abyss, the inside of her pupil, just the black parts of my heart that I had left.

The water choked me, filled my lungs before the words could ever escape. Buried below my own decisions just like I was now. No words would fix this, would save me from the hell I constructed. The purgatory I was holding within me.