It's not something I really want to face. But there was dirt on my face, and I put it there. My knees gave out, I couldn't stand. I couldn't stand anything at all.

I had a nightmare

and it lasted for days.

It came to a head this weekend, and I thought I'd never escape.  I grabbed my hair and screamed; I pinched myself and punched myself and smacked my head against white-washed concrete, but I couldn't wake up. I still had dirt under my fingernails just yesterday from clawing the ground (they're painted red, now), digging for what I'm not sure.  Maybe I was digging for Hell because even that would have been better than the macabre reality I was stuck in the middle of like a poor, helpless fly in a spider's web.  But I felt smaller than a fly.  I felt smaller than the smallest thing, yet I held enough terror inside me to drown a city.

He screamed at me and slammed the car door, and the glass didn't shatter but my insides did. Tears unleashed but they did no good this time--didn't soften his angry heart, and I shouted at him through the night to please get back in so we could go home.  Our home was a twisted and gnarled mirror, a contorted funhouse reflection (though not so fun) of what it used to be or what it could have been or what it should have been, or a little bit of each.

My happiness laughed at me, an evil, scornful laugh as it hung in the air above his head, just out of my reach,  black and choking me where once it had slid down easily as honey in warm tea.  It mocked me now, my happiness, and I chased it, wild and frantic, with the car but could never catch up, not even close.  He got back in and took the wheel, and the car jerked and swayed and my stomach wretched--he was drunk.

And I screamed like I was inside a glass bubble and he ignored me like he was outside the bubble and I tried to jump out of the speeding car, but he caught me. I told him that I wanted to die and he coolly told me "no," that I didn't want to die, but for the first time in awhile, I felt it was my only true escape.

He talked to my ex over text as the car ripped and roared and winded, too fast and not always in our lane, down back roads I'd probably known before but in my haze could not recognize.  I couldn't look in the mirror--I wouldn't recognize her either.  I could feel my skin turning read, the chaffing tears were digging ravines in my pretty little cheeks, and the nightmare went on.

They talked and I didn't know what it was about.  "What are you talking about?" I asked him, my stomach clenched in utter regret and turmoil for living the last five years of my life at all.  "Why?" he asked with a caustic attitude, "you scared I'm gonna find something out?" 

The acid inside me boiled; we were out of the car and we were back in it.  My phone was thrown on the pavement, hard, twice, by some girl who had once been me, and I hoped I'd never have to look at it again, the thing that seemed to ruin my world, flip it upside down and shake it until I couldn't recognize a single detail.  I wanted to throw up.  I was going to throw up.  My stomach heaved, again and again, but I couldn't exorcise the upset inside.  I'd have to keep it wrapped in viscera, waiting there, wet and warm and throbbing, anxious to seize upon and strangle whatever future joy I might think I've found between nightmares.

Hell is probably a place on earth, and it's not just for bad people.  Seated at the right hand of the devil, stabbed and burnt, is all of us, waiting and hoping and praying that we might wake up.