"Leave me alone, okay?! I said no. I don't want your uber happy roundly shaped pill of happy times with rainbow balls and glitter and also unicorns that eat virgins. Leave me! I wish to wallow around like a drunken walrus in my solitary darkness!!!!"
You reside in seeds of sickness
A house of unborn virtue
Castrating the connection between
Doing everything you can to modify
What it is I see in my eyes
In my head, your love was better left unsaid
There will be no corners cut no chance to sneak in through the back door
If I'm really who you want, then stand fast
No faltering, no falling down
I won't mistake you for perfect
But at least attempt to make a move in my direction
Say your selection now, or lose your so-called savior
The angel you claim to adore
The one that you abandoned
Damaging and dissonant you seem
Saying anything you can to pacify
What you've done to my heart
To my soul, I will not give you control
Another story inspired by the MH prompt generator. I liked writing this one!
From way before the time Tim could remember, he had been uneasy about corners. Perhaps it was instinct. No animal liked getting trapped in a corner. The fought back against what had forced them there. That’s what Tim felt like doing every time he somehow found himself in the corner of a room. He never sat in the corner desks in his classes. At parties, he would stand on the middle of the room, far away from the walls. Even as a child, playing hide and seek, he never counted standing in a corner.
Now, he wouldn’t be caught dead standing against a wall with his back to the rest of the world. Was it claustrophobia? Maybe, although he had never been nervous in his small car or in his modestly-sized apartment. He came to accept it and learned to ignore his strange aversion.
It wasn’t until Alex’s film that it started resurfacing. If he stood too close to a corner, his palms would sweat and his heart would beat like a drum. He would get the inexplicable urge to flee like a panicked hare. He would want to tear out of the room and keep running until he was outside in the fresh air, taking huge gulps of breath.
When he was with the rest of the cast, he tried to hide it. There was only one occasion that he couldn’t stand, when he had been running over lines with Jay and Alex. He had been standing with his back to the corner, which was preferable to facing it, but the entire time, he had wanted to get away. The feeling became worse when he felt a familiar chill run up his spine halfway between trading off lines with Alex. It had been a gigantic relief to get out of there, but it still left Tim asking questions. Why didn’t he like corners? It was just plain childish.
He would get the answers, of course, in all the wrong ways. The day Alex took him to the abandoned hospital, his skin was prickling again and his mouth went dry every time he looked into the cells. Then, Alex wouldn’t make up his fucking mind about where he wanted to film and all Tim wanted to do was sock him once, just to let out his pent-up aggression.
Instead, he turned away to answer nature’s call and received a strike to his head which rendered him unconscious. His mind was far from quiet, though. He dreamed he was a child again, huddled in his cell in the hospital. He curled up on his bed, swaddled in his blanket, shivering in the darkness. Lights out had been a forever ago. All he could see out his window was stars, but even they were being swallowed by the rapidly encroaching darkness. When he could no longer hear crickets or owls, he whimpered and buried his face in his pillow.
Why did you do it?
“I didn’t mean to.”
You disobeyed me.
“The doctor told me you aren’t real.”
Whatever he had done no longer mattered. What did matter was that the Tall Man was angry and that Tim was now going to be punished.
The doctor lies.
“He’s nice to me!”
He doesn’t own you. You belong to me!
Tim shook his head, be he knew it was useless.
You know what to do.
“I…I don’t wanna.” Fat tears streamed down Tim’s face.
Are you refusing me again?
“No…no…”
He felt things brush his skin, cold, smooth things that felt like long snakes. He cried out and jumped out of bed, shaking. The room was darker now. He couldn’t see the hall light under the door anymore.
Go.
Sobbing and shivering, Tim inched his way over to the space between his bed and the wall, towards the sharp angle of the corner. The snakes caressed his skin every step of the way. He clutched the blanket around him, but it didn’t stop the cold that permeated the blanket. He felt so alone, but he knew he wasn’t alone. To truly be alone would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this. The Tall Man would make him stand like this for hours without letting him warm up or rest his feet. The Tall Man would make him do it for his own good, so he learned not to disobey. He had disobeyed before and he would do it again. Every time, he would be punished.
The older Tim woke up on the floor of the decrepit hospital with blood in his hair, not able to see anything through the pitch black whatsoever. The cold pressed around him and pierced inside him. He gasped and his lungs burned. He scrambled to his knees and felt around for his camera. It was after a half hour of blind wandering in the forest that he found his way back into the annex of the hospital.
He staggered into a room, ducking out of the beam of Alex’s flashlight. The room was dirty and small. The walls crowded him as he threw himself down and curled up in the corner. There was no help for it. It was either that or Alex. Fear or death.
His thoughts were drowned out. The darkness devoured him. A deep itch in his chest forced him to cough. He clasped his hands over his mouth. Alex must not find him. And then he felt His presence, close. The snakes coiled over his skin. A scream bubbled in his chest that he didn’t dare let out. He didn’t dare speak. He didn’t dare move.
But he knew he would be in the corner for hours and hours, just like before.
