Disoriented.
You blink uncomprehendingly, and suddenly you're not sure if it's all real.
You get to work to see an email from a girl you've known maybe a month...a girl who has done what you thought no one would ever do again. She's somehow tricked you into calling her one of your best friends, no matter how frightening that term is to you. You sit down with your pile of paperwork around you and you look at it, blinking, your eyes focusing without a mind behind them.
You listen to her sad tale and you realize you're not alone in the bitter sorrow that has somehow become your whole world. You fumble about, switching back and forth between a feeble attempt at starting your day's work...and trying to listen to her, to commisserate, to be there for her as unselfishly as you can possibly be. You look over at the cheap cafeteria cups sitting upside down on your desk. Coffee. You really don't want any. You actually can't conceive of anything you could possibly want right at the moment, but the coffee would at least get some of your work finished. There's a reason you can find coffee in every office in the country...and it's not because penny-pinching corporate managers like giving you treats in the morning.
You shuffle over to the little kitchen and you pour some of the last cheap, inky brew from a thin, cheap coffee pot into your cheap foam-coated white paper cup. You dump office-issue sugar and powdered cream into it, making it tolerable, and you return to that email. As you write, you pour what's left of your heart out to your dear friend, but you find your words coming out as desaturated as the papers coming off the copier next to your cubicle. Your mind goes to your medicine, the medicine that works silently to give you your sense of self, the person everyone knows and some have even come to love. You think about how you're taking the last of it, draining the dregs from the bottle. For days, you've been taking far less than you should be. After tonight, it'll be gone. You fear what it will do to you. Your medicine is like daylight on a once-haunted countryside. The sun is fading. When the daylight fails, night will come...bringing terrors you only remember in distant stories. The night will transform you into some hideous creature and you will forget who you're supposed to be. Everyone you love and everyone that sees you will start to stare as you transform into a nightmare, and you will have to retreat deep into the night. Living becomes impossible. You must contemplate your own death.
All will turn to darkness.
And then you remember another night. Last night. You dimly remember a dark, shadowy room. You dimly remember a conversation with the girl you love more than life itself, someone you've spent every moment with for four long, arduous, trying years. You remember your ears getting hot when she said, "I have to be honest with you.", because you knew she would utter something terrible. You hear a story about a man she met on her bus ride and how she fell for him. You are a lesbian that loves a straight woman. She made out with him passionately for her entire thirteen-hour ride. All your fears were confirmed. She not only fell for the first person she got a chance with, but he lives close by. She will be seeing him much, much more. You remember seeing a world through a haze of tears. You remember having nothing left to say after you told her you wanted nothing more to do with her. You remember vague, half-considered impulses....you remember casting spells, making offerings to terrible entities in the night, but for what, you don't know. Your dreams are dark and you wake with that faintly bitter, newly-sober feeling like you got violently drunk....but you're not a drinker. Chatter in your mind. A bland, disgusting swirl of emotions you have to try hard to name, mixed into a brown puddle like sherbet stirred and long melted. Longing. Love. Disgust. Hate. Weariness. Confusion.
Despair.
And now you're at work and the world makes no more sense than it did when you woke up. You trust the universe to provide answers but beyond the clamor in your own awareness, all you hear is silence.
The deepest of silence.
But some machines move silently....and you know fate is moving. Like that "Footprints in the Sand" picture you see hung up in the home of every elderly Christian you've ever seen.
Things are moving. A faintly bitterly bland taste lies in your mouth.
Things are moving.
And you fear where they will take you, because no matter what it is, you know that it will only be more incomprehensible, insane, than it already is.
You have no words left, for anything.
Wait...
Wait...
In silence.