My Mind will Never Cease to Be

I can’t get up.

I can’t move. I can’t see. I can’t get up.

I can still feel. I can still feel the deep sting of the blade he used to rupture my heart. I felt my blood leave my body, coating his hands with sticky redness. I felt his hands close around my waist as he hauled my useless body off the floor. I felt any remaining air abruptly leave my lungs, as he dropped me into my eternal grave.

I can still hear. I can hear his hammer, rhythmically fixing planks of wood into place, sealing me underground. Bit. By. Bit.

I can’t see. I closed my eyes as the blade made impact and now they’re frozen shut, trapping me in the dark.

I wait. I wait for my mind to disappear. For oblivion to steal me before my time. I wait, and I wait.
I should be dead now. I’m empty of blood. My heart has spluttered its final gasp. I should be dead. I shouldn’t be able to think.

My body feels strange. Cold. Like Ice. I want to shiver and hug myself for warmth. Burrow in the soil underneath me. But I can’t move. Why aren’t I dead?

It’s only when I feel my muscles stiffening against my bones, crystallising, that it hits me. I’ve been dead for hours, but oblivion is lost to me. My mind lingers on this mortal plane like fungus.

Maybe it’s anger. Maybe I can’t accept that my time was taken from me. Or maybe this is what death is.
Perhaps our minds aren’t our brains, but our souls. Our bodies are no more than the prisons they are trapped in.

My mind races. Every inch of my fleshy prison screams in horror. I force my thoughts to retire. I wish them out of existence. Anything to stop feeling myself wither and crumble to nothing.

Still, I remain.

How long have I been screaming for? Days maybe? Time is nothing now. I hear a faint buzz whiz past my ear. A fly. It’s the only sound I’ve heard bar his footsteps above me. I’m glad for the company until I feel it’s legs scuttling down my body. One. Two. Then more, and more. I can’t beat them away and the tickling is torture.

I feel the wriggling and writhing of tiny creatures embedded in my skin. They were laying thousands of their kin within me. They burrow deeper within me, feasting upon my insides.

I cling to my mind. The only thing I have. I block out the nauseating feeling of my skin stretching and my stomach bloating and putrid gas filling my nose with ungodly stench. I want to vomit up everything I’ve ever eaten knowing I’m the source.

Memories. I hang onto images of my past like a lifeline.

I trace every detail of my mother’s face until I can recall the intricacies of her features with perfect clarity. I’ve burned her maternal gaze into my mind. I long for her comfort, as I recall my life, like film running through a projector behind my eyes.

I replay images of my father. Deft hands tinkling across the piano. Mozart. Bach. Elgar. He reads me fairy stories dramatically. He performs each character like he has an audience of a hundred rather than one.
There’s liquid pouring from my nose. Thick. It slides down my face and I’m glad I didn’t scream as I died.

Days now? Or months? I curse that I didn’t pay attention in science, otherwise I could’ve tracked my state of decay. My bloated skin is collapsing. It disintegrates into useless mulch. It slips from my body and hits the mud below me with a wet squelch. The wiggling is everywhere. Corrupting everything.

I read myself stories with happy endings and comforting lies. I hope to drown out the sound of flesh slipping and hitting flesh.

I trace my life, running it through my head again and again. I bask in how ordinary it was. Why was I discontent? Why did I want more when what I had was perfect? Why did I wish my time away if this was to be my fate?

The maggots are on my eyelids now. They nibble at my eyelids and for a split second I see the floorboards above me. Tiny streams of light escape into my grave and I want to cry at the beauty of the sight. Then the maggots swarm my vision. I picture tears slipping down my cheeks as they steal my eyes.

It will be dark forever now. What was that Shakespeare Quote? “They have made worm’s meat of me.” I giggle internally as the fat maggots gorge themselves on the last of my flesh.

I feel lesser with every agonising second of time, stretching into eternity.

My feeling lessens as my body dries like a rough towel left in the blazing sun. I flake and crumble and I’m nothing but a shell. Nothing inside. Nothing outside. I need to kill time. Erode it with my thoughts. I run through my life again and memories aren’t enough so I analyse it back to front. Side to side. I examine every angle possible. There’s no conclusion or escape. There’s no reason for this. No explanation for this mental prison.

I’ll exist to see us burn the world.

And I do.

I lie here. I hear the building crumble around me. Falling. Rebuilding. Changing. Falling. Rebuilding. I lie here. I sense the ground warm beneath me. It’s dry where it should be damp. The house falls. It stays fallen this time and the air is thick with heat. It burns me where my lungs should be. It heats over decades or centuries or millennia until it’s even unbearable for my dulled sensation. I lie here. There’s nothing, and did we do it? Did we destroy ourselves yet? I lie here.

There’s nothing.

I lie here.

I’ll always lie here.

Credit: Rose de Mai

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