Tombstones

Tombstones

By Ryan Billington

Sometime between 2006 and 2007

I don’t know how I got here.

Covered with cuts and bruises;

My left arm is numb and my head is throbbing.

I find myself in the bottom of a crevasse.

Something is behind me—I have to get out.

Running frantically, trying to escape this doom.

Emotions rush through me like riptides, creating a storm inside—

Unpredictable currents with no purpose or direction,

Blowing, tossing the small paper boat of my sanity like chafe in the wind.

On an impulse, I rush at the canyon wall

Grabbing at sticks and sand,

Trying to pull myself out of this prison.

But the lock holds firm.

The sand melts into emptiness, and the sticks are transformed into loose briars

That only tear at my hands.

Falling… falling yet again.

The impact sends my mind further into delirium.

Panic furthers its grip on me;

I can feel the crack running down my mind—

Reason is being fought by Panic.

I am fighting a loosing battle; I am being taken over.

What will happen when my desire shrivels to the nothingness that surrounds me?

I’ll fade away—

Becoming part of this desolate wasteland,

Melting away into the sand.

Every path I stumble up ends in another bruise, another knock to my reeling mind

Every rock and briar that I grasp collapses.

Is this it?  Will I simply fade away?

I can find no escape,

Desperately trying to hold onto the little life I have left.

Another desperate lunge, another failure.

My senses are spinning

I try to stand but instead sink to battered knees.

It’s playing with my emotions:

Panic, anger, fear

Emptiness, loneliness.

We cannot both survive this.

I can’t escape; I can’t run away.

I’ve finally found myself in the corner I’ve seen coming in the worst of my nightmares.

But they used to be only nightmares—

Then, I could wake up.

Now, I can’t.

Will I ever wake up again?

As myself?

Will it leave me?  Will I become a shell?

Without feeling, emotion, intellect, personality—

Melting into the sand of mediocrity so well that I shall simply disappear.

Fatalism—I loathe the very word.

There is always hope, but I cannot find it.

I cannot get out.

I am stuck and loosing my mind as my emotions are played with like I am some sort of toy.

Life is beautiful—

But living a deadness is like living in hell:

Seeing but never being able to create, to form, to have;

Tasting warmth to know the bitter cold;

Seeing a glimpse of the sun so that I may fathom the complete blackness in which I’ve lost my way.

God can pierce this darkness, but the damage has been done—

The scars will remain.

I must do something to escape from this crevasse

But I am forced to do nothing.

Only to sit and watch, helpless in this awful reality of the garbage that surrounds my cage.

Instead, we walk around this graveyard, this crevasse

And analyze, critique.

Why do we choose to stay here instead of running to the meadow that is over the hill?

No.

We stay and analyze the tombstones…