A Man Possessed
I woke up this morning in a time warp. The strange thing was I didn’t care. The reasons didn’t matter. All that mattered was that this girl, this pathetic useless, young girl (Kim, for future reference), had taken me back. And she wanted me, really wanted me. It didn’t matter that I had no idea how I’d gotten here, that I had no recollection whatsoever of how I’d travelled from my local in Edinburgh all the way back to this shitty little room, in my shitty little hometown of Great Shitting Yarmouth.
No, none of that mattered, or even occurred to me. All that mattered is that I had woken up that morning and she was there with me again. She was lying next to me and she was telling me it was time for me to wake up. It didn’t matter that I was in what was akin to a drunken haze. I was just so goddamn happy to see her. The only thing I could focus on was that we had broken up 3 years ago but now she had taken me back. Nothing else seemed relevant.
What an idiot.
What a fucking idiot.
Rewind to last week. I’m living in Edinburgh, just moved here a few months ago. I’m sitting in my local with this cute girl, Emma, we’ve kind of been dating. She’s pierced and tattooed and everything I’ve always lusted after. Edinburgh and Emma are my idea of perfection. In this little heaven of mine there are no thoughts of Kim at all. We’ve been broken up for three years and my life has moved to far more interesting places. I’ve loved girls who treated me better than she did and I’ve slept with girls who screwed me better. Not one shred of my heart is with her anymore. No part of my mind resides in our sickly-sweet, small town love.
Emma excuses herself with a very ladylike “Going to the pisser.”, it just makes me like her more to be honest, I don’t like girls that are too self conscious, I like a bit of crass in my women.
I sit alone at the bar waiting for her to come back, thinking that tonight I might actually get my dick wet. I stare into my half empty pint glass thinking about what I’d like to do to Emma when I get her back to the flat.
“It’s taken me a while to find you again, I hope you’re worth the wait.”
The voice is familiar, I start to turn around to see what alluring woman it belongs to but I suddenly feel like I’m falling, something soft is clamped over my nose and mouth, it smells horrible. The last thing that I can remember is the green felt of the pool table floating past my vision, then;
Darkness.
Next thing is I wake up this morning unequivocally, one hundred percent, in love with Kim again. I haven’t even seen her in the last 2 and half years, it’s not like we ever ran in the same circles, I even moved across the country to avoid her, yet somehow I’m transformed. I’m like a newborn puppy; completely dependent on her for every direction, for even the smallest guidance, all I can think of doing is following her around and basking in her deflected glow. Her very presence makes me ache.
She gets up naked from the bed, throws me smile from over her shoulder, and tells me to get dressed. My mind is in a fog, I can just about focus on her words but I have no idea of their meaning, it feels like I’m dreaming. She starts pulling clothes on over her bony body. I came to hate that body over time; its jutting ribs, the sharp hips and shoulders, the complete lack of a feminine form. Right now though, I’m adoring it. I don’t even know what I want to do! I feel like I want to fuck her but also feel like that would be defiling her beauty in some way, so I just stare at her. She waves my jeans at me;
“Clothes? Are you going to wear some?”
“Hmm, clavsh abdaoshafka. HAHAHAHAHA.” Is what I hear someone reply, I don’t think it was me because I clearly said ‘Yeah, clothes, of course.’, I look around for someone else and realize we’re the only two people in the room. I feel embarrassed and try to throw her a boyish grin but I just end up dribbling on myself and giggling.
I think she understands though because she smiles at me brightly, warmly, it lifts my heart. I take my jeans from her and pull them on with some difficulty. My t-shirt hits me in the face and lands in my lap. I stare at it for a few minutes while I figure out how to put it on. When did dressing become so hard? As soon as I can think that the thought is replaced. The only thing I can truly stay focused on is my wont to please Kim and my abounding joy at being with her. I continue to navigate my t-shirt and dribble like a moron. It seems the longer I’m awake the more intense my love for her becomes, simultaneously though it’s like everything else is slowly being tuned out. She is pure clarity and everything around her is tv static.
In this moment though I really don’t care. I can’t even figure out how to.
Flash back to four years ago; I was 21, she was 17, she adored me.
I was doing what I do best, I had taken the stance of the broken, the world weary and I was playing the part of the tortured artist very well. She was young and naive and I must have seemed very enigmatic and mysterious in those years, I can understand why she fell in love with me. As for me, I kept her at arm’s length for a while, played a few little games with her and then one day I got bored.
The thing you need to understand about me is that I consider most people in my life to be some kind of social experiment. It’s not a good or honorable thing to do but I’ve been doing it since I can remember. It just so happened that on this occasion I ended up falling in love. It wasn’t intended and it certainly wasn’t expected. Oh what a surprise she turned out to be. Sometimes I wonder who the real experiment was.
More fool me I guess.
Let’s get back to the disastrous bedroom dribbling. We are now venturing out of the house. She’s having a little difficulty getting me down the stairs and through doors and such. I fail to see what the problem is as I’m most sure that I’m behaving like an upstanding gentleman. The reality, however, seems to be that I have absolutely no motor functions, apart from maybe the overwhelming desire to split my head open on the floor. In fact, I believe I’m exceeding greatly at head butting stairs and pavement. With a little gentle steering from Kim I seem to be stumbling in the general direction of a bus stop. I must look like a moron, you know, one of those ‘special people’, the people that you know you’re really not meant to call ‘special’ but come on, who are they really fooling?
So here we are, still dribbling. Kim is whispering reassuring things into my ear. She apologises for keeping me waiting.
“Don’t worry my love, not long now. Soon, soon we’ll be together.”
One of my hands is clenching hers and she squeezes it tight and smiles at me. All I can do is stare as my other hand paws uncontrollably at the shoulder of her jacket. My drool has now wet the front of my t-shirt and my face is plastered with a ridiculous grin. No wonder people are moving away from us. She just continues to smile beautifully at me and all my worries and questions about what the hell is going on are erased. For now.
Jump forward to our destination. I can’t remember the bus journey, the same as I can’t remember getting back to this scummy little town. I’m sat on a bar stool in some dingy, sweat and sawdust type joint. It looks like it could of been a bar once. A dirty glass of water sits in front of me and I’m instantly reminded of the pub I left so abruptly in Edinburgh. Kim isn’t around anymore, I’m not happy any more, my idiotic grin has vanished and my euphoria has been replaced with a warranted paranoia and fear. Rational thought seems to be coming back to me in increments. My brain seems fully aware but my body just isn’t responding. Now the reasons do matter, more than anything, I need the reasons. I need some goddamn answers.
Here’s my pickle though, although my mind is rife with turmoil, inner conflict and the burning need to take action; If you were to look at me right now all you would see is a man in a catatonic state. An imbecile staring blankly forward into his dirty glass of water, a waterfall of drool down his chin and a nice dark stain across the front of his t-shirt. It’s invisible juxtaposition I’m telling you.
This sound starts to rise all around me, it’s a deep, primal sound, it fills the whole room like smoke. It feels like a vibration in my stomach, like a lead weight on all my limbs, a pressure against my brain. It becomes two hands and they’re trying to push the sides of my skull together.
All control is gone, every part of me falls slack, I piss myself as I fall limply backwards. My eyes continue their monotonous stare and I watch my glass of water turn into the bright greasy lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I am unable to move even a millimetre of my own accord. All I can do is lay back in my own piss and listen to that deep, primal sound as it gets louder and louder.
I hear footsteps coming towards me, I try to scream out for help and realize I’m already screaming out. That deep primal sound that’s weighing me down? You guessed it.
It’s me. I’m fucking chanting.
Chanting.
Who even chants any more?
Back to my backfired social experiment.
So I ended up falling in love. And boy was it a sickly love; we made everyone around us feel uncomfortable, we had no world outside of each other’s arms and for a little under a year we were pretty much one person. I naively thought we would always be together.
Then one summer’s day she calls me, says she’s changed her mind about the whole thing. She looks me dead in the eye and says she doesn’t love me anymore. Great. My world had just crumbled. I felt like someone had died, but instead of a big gaping hole where that person should be, she was like a walking fucking corpse. A constant reminder of a complete rejection. I am completely broken. She just acts like thats the best thing she could have asked for.
I would always claim that I saw it coming but truthfully I was too wrapped up in my own pretentious little world to realise that she just wasn’t there anymore. She had gotten secretive, she had gotten dark, I had just failed to notice.
I did all the usual break up stuff; I got seriously out of control, made her buy back her own artwork, left threatening voicemails and slightly stalked her. Eventually though I grew the fuck up and got on with the rest of my life.
Now lets fast forward to a few minutes ago, to a few meagre minutes before I started telling you this whole pathetic story.
I’m lying on my back in the filthy, beat down, boarded up bar in a pool of my own piss.
I’m still screaming out my deep primal chant to the detriment of my vocal chords. My rational mind has achieved a whole new level of zen. It acknowledges that I should be freaking out but accepts that there’s nothing I can do. My inner calm lets me know that I could really use a strepsel right now.
My whole body begins to vibrate with the primal sound. I can feel the vibration through every bone, every sinew, every muscle. It starts in my stomach and travels over me like a wave. It gets my heart pumping faster, it gets my dick hard and throbbing. Now that’s embarrassing.
I feel hyper sensitive, everywhere begins to hurt. I can feel the pressure and weight of my clothes against my skin. Every nerve ending is on fire, every joint is close to bursting, every muscle is in cramp. My cock feels like it’s going to explode and not in the nice way. I am one constant, long spasm. It feels like my soul is going to be vibrated from my body.
Because, well, it is.
A second wave of feeling spreads out from my stomach. I feel a pop throughout my whole body, like every tendon and every ligament have snapped. Then silence. I watch as a cloud of darkness rises from my body. I see it begin to form above me, this great, dark, hulking shadow. It has no face but somehow it looks down at my limp, close to lifeless, body. I could have sworn that it smiled at me. Then there’s Kim, standing over me with this dark, smug looking beast and I hate her, with all my heart, with every fucked up sinew and fibre in my aching body right now, I hate her.
She stands with her feet to either side of my head and gives me her best shit eating grin. I see her arm raise slightly from her side. I see a dull glint of metal and a black hole held in her hand.
As her arm makes its slow journey I hear myself say;
“Fuck y-”
Then the gunshot interrupts me, she never could let me have the last word.
