Inspired by “When I get low, I get high” by Gordon Webster & Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen

I sit at a bar, trying to drown the evil; evil thoughts that have plagued me for so long in copious amounts of liquor and song. No matter what I do, I simply cannot let go of the things that have molded me into what I am today. They peer down at me, not taking any particular form, from the tops of cold, grey spires of solid stone like gargoyles, rising up around me in a strangling and frigid embrace with red flaming eyes, that remind me of an angry pyre. And in their eyes, I see the very things that made me carry the burden that I felt in the first place. These apparitions appear to me as I fall asleep in the darkness of the night, or when I lie awake as I watch the shadows begin to transform, warp, and bend into the shapes of what I fear most.

I believe that my soul is fragmented to the point of no repair, and from the depths of these crevasses is where I feel like my demons emerge. I tread over these damaged areas of my soul over a rickety rope bridge. While I do have some method of support, there is not too much stopping me from taking one small misstep that will cause me to plummet down and be consumed by the demons that are produced by the regrets that I carry, and that have corrupted me. This is why I don’t like to tread over them, instead preferring to stay in one place condemned to the same evil habits.

I had somebody once. A girl. She was kind, and she would listen to me pour my heart out about my struggles in life. It was... nice. I felt loved, in all my misery and self pity. A light at the end of the tunnel. Suddenly, though, she stopped listening. She felt like I was putting up a farce, and that this was only for my benefit, not hers because she felt like I had stopped caring, as if I didn’t value her anymore. I kicked her out. And when I did, all the half-healed wounds to my soul were reopened, and the demons poured from them afresh. And maybe, she was right. Maybe I had stopped caring for her, I was too absorbed in my own self, to care, to bother, to just sit down and listen to her as she did for me.

----

After she left I got low, very low. And, in the attempt to fix myself, I got high. I began to do drugs and other terrible things to supplement the harm I was doing to my body. Why? I will never know, and I’m only 23. My adult life had really just started, and it already felt like the end.

After a long night of achieving nothing in quelling my inner fears, I get back in my car to return to my apartment to sleep off all the headaches caused by the consecutive nights of alcohol and drug abuse that I subjected myself to. I made it to my bed. Suddenly, I heard a clicking noise, and... voices. The shadows are warping again, but this time it’s... real. I can reach out and almost touch it, feel the matter slipping in and out like water in between my fingers. Except it’s so cold. It’s so, so cold. The voices slowly became more and more clear, and in one voice, in Her voice, I heard;

Your sins have finally caught up to you.

Then I saw it. Emerging from my closet, was a pale, spindly arm like a voodoo spirit. I tried to run. Tried to scream. Then another arm, which snuck its way out of the closet like a snake, as if it had no bones. After that, a third that bent and cracked as it emerged at an awful angle. More and more arms came out of the closet until I counted eight on one side. They pulled the door open, and from there emerged a head that was shaped like a man’s, but didn’t look like one. It just had eyes. One for each hole in a normal person’s face. It’s skin warped and bubbled as the arms shifted into place, and it practically teleported to the foot of my bed, shifting the darkness around it as it did so. It was staring at me with its six grotesque, evil eyes. I felt something. I saw particles moving from my fingertips. Then, my hands were gone. Then my arms. Soon, my shoulders and legs. All being absorbed through its evil eyes.

My demons had manifested themselves into a physical form, and now it was consuming me, all due to a crushed soul that chose not to be mended. My body felt like it was on fire. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t. It was like trying to shout in an airlock in the vacuum of space. I was alone. Nobody but me. Nothing could save me now.

At last, all the troubles in this town have found me.