Life, but not as you know it - Flash Fiction

Pain is almost palpable, it bleeds into your life in many ways, intercepting your thoughts and redirecting them into a thick, white, all-consuming fog. It has no desires, other than to drag you down into its depths and attempt to drown you.

You fight, and it draws back long enough for you to believe you’re you once more. That shining, bright-eyed, optimistic person who lived life by their own rules. The thinker, who relished the ability to concentrate above all others, the one who was praised for their organisation, a light at the end of the tunnel realised for a moment.

Through a concealed veil it grasps at you once more, berating you for your attempt at ordinariness, lest you forget for just one moment the vice grip it has on you and your life, your hopes, your fears, your body. Your anxieties present in night terrors, waking desperate, shivering and breathless in a drug-addled fog. You don’t recall the dream because a plague floods your mind, it’s colour, a murky grey tinged with piercing bleakness as you strive for any rational thought.

“No normalcy for you my friend, oh, no, you will suffer as I dictate,” It demands, its voice as low as a caress while its lips make love to your body in its macabre way.

“This will never end,” it taunts you, “I am your constant companion, you and I will become friends eventually.” Except I know we will not, addled and punch-drunk though I am, I will never let it in, never let it win. I acknowledge its power over me, but it is no sovereign in my state, no utopian leader in the way I think; when I can find clarity to contemplate such a thing.

Pain expresses love through radiating feeling, pulling back and then hitting you full force with its wrath. It hates to be ignored and lies dormant like a sly asp, a coiled spring, a barracuda in its subaqueous hide, waiting to strike. Only when you least expect it does it attack, sending your body into crisis, raw torment like the pinnacle of a climax. There is no highlight to this meridian, no peak or culmination, only torture and misery. It consummates the relationship, giving birth to only suffering.

Your hand trembles as you reach for the drugs, the blessed relief, your saviour, tiny circular lifeboats in a sea of affliction. You take the opiate and it desensitizes you more, a sheen of perspiration envelops your skin, yet comes bliss and blessed relief for a short time.

You allow your brain to float away into an obfuscate and deadened mass, a myriad of euphoric sensations calling you to them, like sirens, and you go willingly because compared to your old friend, the one who is always by your side, it is the superior choice.

Your fiendish friend, its severe and vulgar feeling is dampened down, while you forget for a time.

You forget everything, blockading your nerves, as the tincture spreads to tranquilise your very being.

Life is no longer as you know it, nor remember it, you just exist and you are gratified not to fight for a time, your unwelcome archenemy no longer present, but replenishing itself for the next foray.