Blue Screen Life

It starts with a shiver. It's the kind of shake you get right at the end of an adrenalin rush, when the crowd around you is just coming down from their most intense, and you're still reeling with emotion and power and you just get a shiver down your spine and you know you're beyond thinking. It's that kind of a shiver.

Then it continues with words. Words pounding into your head, words that act like drugs, every single one that hits your brain sends you further into oblivion, makes it harder to actually say any of the words on your mind. They keep pounding, and it could be seconds or days, but sometime, it bursts.

Let me tell you about that.

When it's days, it comes slowly, it builds momentum, until the words come out. They aren't the right words, not the ones punching you from the inside, but they come out, and they flood and they flood and they flood for a week, until you finally run out. There isn't a fear or an apprehension, there is simply you, there is existence, this is the price you pay for loss of control. No one can tell you that something is impossible, no one can tell you that you are alive. The world outside your head is irrelevant--the world inside is non-existent.

But when it's seconds is what's important. Something triggers it, something calls it all out, and then there aren't any words any more. There aren't any thoughts or rationale, there is building, building, building and then you are standing, there is a mirror in front of you, or maybe the inside of a closet door, and you are suddenly anemic. Maybe temporarily, maybe that's that, you never know, but the world around you is covered in blood and life, and there is no way of finding anything but the fear. Who did this, what caused it, when will my senses return--why is there no pain.

And then there is the inbetween; the moments between when the trigger gives and when the rational returns, the single moment of clarity: thisisit. A split-second gospel, an epiphany, everything is set and clear, and then it descends to madness. There is feeling, there is clawing, there is such a desparate meaning in every second, and such a horrifying need to escape, to return to a world where thoughts matter, where everything isn't blank and fearsome, and then there is a blade, there is a resurrection, there is an awakening, there is such a lack of colour that it's almost difficult to believe you are there at all.

And the question is, which is worse: The moments of thoughtless desperation, or the rational terror? And how can you really write the ending to a story which may never end?