Sanity

It’s the tremble before the fall, the silence following sadness, the crater creating emptiness.

I count the tiles, line by line. Peeling barriers away with a scalpel and pen. Riddles scribbled on bundles of tissues and parchment and slowly the sound in my throat is collapsed and I can speak nevermore. Bound by stitches and methodical decisions, I am crippled by every utterance of achievement. Peddles divide in his rodent eyes, sizing me over, scrutinizing.  Seizing, heaving breaths leave me as mist sprayed against the wispy white locks of the sterile penitentiary. He leaves exhaling his presence with white robes fluttering and a lingering stench of sanctity upon the chambers. It’s on my skin. Sinking in, in, in my skin. I bat my eyes back and forth, searching my surroundings for a hole to fall through. Nothing. My fingers rake through my mangy scalp, raping and carving into the swollen flesh. I feel the maggots crawl within my brain, swimming in my mind and eating my thoughts. I have to get away; I have to clean it away. Gone, goodbye, get away! Please, please, please!

Still I feel bulbous and beady creatures devouring me. Inside me. Consummating, multiplying, and dividing within me and within moments or miles of time I will evolve into a mutant maggot with ravenous, endless black eyes. A wail, a protest, permits itself to sound within the confines of my cell, but its frequency goes unsounded and wound around my neck much like a noose. Blue strings wrap around my wrists, extensions of monsters that infect me from within, climbing along the thin skin.

My sanity. It rides along indistinguishable hinges, so obscure to the naked eye that many have overlooked it. It is easy to pass by the reverberating needles of stability when the sound that whips itself to reveal is null. Yet it remains stuffed away, kept hidden and secure, because something so precious must remain undiscovered in the utmost of ways.