There can never be a moment sweeter than this. We’re tangled in a sea of blankets as warm as a summer breeze, or the steam rising from a fragrant cup of tea. Legs twisted, fingers entwined together, we’re inseparable. In the dark of night our bond cannot be broken. Her soft, smooth skin spread out like a vast canvas beneath my privileged fingertips. We’ve explored each other countless times before, but each time there is something new and exciting to discover. She smells of light sweat and the remnants of floral perfume. First we are clinging bodies, and then inside her we become one…
Wait, everything’s gone black! Where is the luminescent evening glow? She is gone, the warmth is gone… this is something different and something all too familiar. No! No, God please no, not this same dream again! I see her golden hair spread across the dull carpet, matted with blood and tangled in the telephone cord wrapped around her neck. The floor around her blue body is scattered with empty bottles, my sleeping pills. The stereos on repeat… our song. The same sickening song, playing over and over again, much like this horrible scene in my mind. “Oh, baby I love your way…”

Don’s subconscious yanked him from the suffocating coma of his nightmare. Like every previous and identical night, he screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed, until his throat was raw and he had made himself sick with the sound. Tonight it was worse, tonight the screaming hurt.

He laid his body back down onto his bare mattress and couldn’t help but shake uncontrollably.

"But tonight it’s worse…" Don thought through violent shakes and chattering teeth. "Tonight the screaming hurts."

He couldn’t see clearly, his thoughts were murky and he felt as though he were still in a state of dreaming. A shattering voice screamed from deep within his core, shrieking “WAKE UP!” but his stomach churned and his gut retaliated with the horrorifying truth. He was awake, and that was maybe the scariest and most sickening part of all.

Don was still shivering violently as he pulled himself off of the stained mattress and grabbed the sleeping pills off the nightstand and swallowed one after another, knowing all too well sleep would never return to him again. In fact, it felt as if he hadn’t slept in months… 5 months and 24 days to be exact.

He staggered into the kitchen and felt around in the dark for a bottle of warm vodka that had been sitting on the counter since the previous night and lit up a cigarette. Unthinking, he wandered into the living room and stopped cold, arrested by what came into vision. Cigarette ashes danced to the floor. He was already beginning to feel a numbing, the shaking had subsided and it felt as if all the blood had been drained from his body through each one of his pores. The feeling, replayed once, twice, a thousand times, never got old. He looked at the hard wood floor, the carpet had been removed almost immediately after the incident, and then looked at the ancient telephone in the corner of the room that had remained untouched for 5 months and 24 days. He knew that this was proof that he was stuck in a living, waking nightmare.

He felt like there was still a human, a lover, an actual soul still fighting for survival… stuck in the body of a medicated, tormented mess and living a life that couldn’t possibly be his own. And that soul was clawing, fighting, trying to rip free from its lifeless prison, but he was sure that nothing would ever break through ever again.

Behind Don’s eyes, dull grey eyes that would never see the same way again, and in the back of his hollowed head where a brain would never think the same way again… it felt as if something was eating him alive from the inside out.

He and Sarah had been living together. The very same unwelcoming 4 ½ where he now stood had been their castle, their slice of domestic heaven… it had character before it had been stained by horror. The smell of stale cigarettes and indescribable sickness was replaced by the smell of cooking and floral perfume and lovemaking and city air wafting in through the opened windows. Don had never been happier in his life, all the years with this angel had been God’s compensation for painful years he had endured in his youth. They were both only in their late-twenties, but this was the woman that he knew completed him in every way. Everything about her was beautiful and pure, her soft fragrant skin, her full lips, her flowing blond hair… he made love to an angel every night, and every night she wrapped her wings around him.

But the joy within their everyday bliss was short lived, because soon after came the news… Sarah was pregnant. This was Judgment day; the day she lost her wings. They had been so selfishly ripped from her back, every feather plucked. Her family tied a noose around her throat, inhumanly cold and inhumanly Catholic. They filled her head with their twisted morals, preaching that having a child out of wedlock was immoral. It was wrong, it was evil, it wasn’t meant to be, they’d disown her, she’d go to hell. This baby was not meant to see the light of day. Of course, this was the way God would have wanted things, they said, most certainly. They planted all of these seeds within her that sprouted in her darkening state of confusion, growing and twisting and choking her once flourishing soul. Suffocating, Sarah went into a downward spiral of depression, one Don couldn’t pull her out of, he himself being weak, dependent on her and scared. That’s when the drugs and the drinking from his youth came back into play, skeletons he hadn’t dug up since Sarah had come into his life in the first place. Old loves, they die hard. Old addictions, they die harder.

She couldn’t bring herself to snuff out the beauty of the life growing inside of her, so she decided to cut off her family instead. It was the hardest decision she had ever made, but as she caressed her growing belly and felt the warm presence within, she found solace. She would start her own family, rebuild it. She knew it would be difficult, of course, but Don was the man she planned spending the rest of her life with and even if it was an early and unplanned for start to their family, she was sure he'd would support her all the way. And Don planned to. He had always wanted to experience fatherhood. He promised himself that he was going to step up and be stronger for her. His child would have a way different childhood than he had experienced. He was going to quit everything once more and get clean and…

Sarah had a miscarriage. She had lost her family, her baby, and there was no one who in the world who could possibly understand her anymore. Maybe her parents were right after all, she thought, maybe this was her punishment. She was already in her own personal hell. The seeds had been sown. When Don found her, he had just gotten home from an all night drug binge, his coping mechanism.

Ron now stared at the spot where her blue body had once lain, entangled in the phone cord.

“Dear God, please make this a dream because I really can’t believe that she’s gone… I’ll wake up and she’ll be next to me…”

His teeth were chattering again, the sound seemed to ricochet off the walls. His body felt as if it were buckling, shutting down beneath him. In a daze, he kicked over the coffee table. He laid his fingers on the cool plastic of the telephone for the first time in months, and an electrical pulse seemed to zap through his veins. He yanked it from the wall and threw it, destroying it in all if its patronizing innocence. He then ran into his room in a blind daze and tore apart his drawers. Amist the dirty clothes, his fingers brushed a tiny glass bottle that made his boiling blood run cold. He gazed in horror and amazement for a frightening instant and then christened the walls with her tiny bottle of perfume. As the glass shattered the smell of sweet, overpowering death filled his nostrils. The smell of perfume struggled to cover everything inside the ringing, spinning room. His vision was beginning to blur and blacken. His knees buckled.

By this time, his neighbors and landlord had heard the racket… the thudding and banging and screaming. A few had come to investigate, but Don could barely hear their gasps as they let themselves in through the door that the landlord had unlocked.

When they found him, he saw a swirling pool of faces starting down at him. And then, about as clear as a mirror he heard someone say…

“Someone call an ambulance, cause’ something isn’t right.”

***

Don was rushed to the hospital. He survived through the night. He lived long enough to wake up to white walls and endless corridors and the echoing loneliness that came along with his empty, sterile room. He had relapsed, had overdosed on sleeping pills and alcohol but by the end of the night and with bated breath, the doctor’s had seemed to get him stabilized. The question is, if he seemed stabilized, why did they find him dead with his hand over his chest and his lips curved upwards in the oddest way, as if smirking, the very next morning?

“We have failed this man; we could have done more…” one doctor said to the other.

“Good riddance, he was too far gone anyway. Didn’t you hear about his wife? It was in all over the papers a few months ago… he practically drove the young girl to suicide, he’s just some pathetic drug addict. He would have died one way or another.”

They looked at the ravaged body lying on the white sheets and nodded in unison. They noted the approximate time of death. As they undressed him, they came across something startling. Carved across the “drug addict’s” chest, deep into his flesh with razor thin precision were six words, words that seemingly hadn’t been their the night before. Was it because the words stood out clearer against his now chalk pale skin, or perhaps… the wounded words were fresh?
”Oh, baby I love your way…” the words screamed from his skin.
Could a person die of a broken heart? Or from a broken body, or a broken spirit? Could a human being simply die from guilt… a guilt searing behind ones eyes, eyes that will never see the world the same way again, a guilt that eats you alive from the inside out? In the medical profession, this is highly debatable. But one thing Don himself could vouched for beyond his waking life; no amount of dreaming, waking, medicating, purging, relapsing, recovering… not even dying can mend a broken soul.

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