The Lucid Sufferer

A story of a man tortured by his own faculties.

Hell hath no fury like the night, with its complete sense of desolation and amputation from life. There are no terribly queer details to keep the mind occupied; no foreign countenances which to judge, and no glorious sunlight to pronounce the presence of reality and to make the distinction between life and limbo less ambiguous.
That which by day is a mere four walls by night becomes a melancholy maze of deceit- Oh the serpentine grasp of darkness! - toying with the very schisms of my mind. Figures become distorted and thought leaves her cursed intentions upon my mind- Take time to notice the ceiling fan, how, I know it’s a ceiling fan and will thus remain but a firm grasp of anything eludes me. I see, not three bulbs but visages, faces. The faces of babies; Nor do I see fan blades but spider legs! How shocking! How terrifying �" sweet, caressing �" How strange! �" Queer and beautiful and exciting and sexy �" Knowing that my eyes deceive me, that a fan is the beasts “real” form I still cower and still I quake in my very loins.
I wish I could sleep through the black, wipe the mirages away with one single movement of an eyelid…… - Simple, how a man always goes back to his mother’s teat in times of uncertainty and illness �" An uncertain illness.

Dissolving delusions in my study, the visions know not of remorse, and I am weary and I am fickle. Alas, my battle with the night has become a penultimate struggle, a pretext to the battle waged by day �" I lack a firm grasp of certainty and a just conscious �" the clash of my nightly insanity with my daily life is an atrocious conflict! I cannot gaze upon the gravel on the street without sensing its movement, seeing every fiber of its atomic composition shaking and quaking and perplexing the mind �" Oh the deceitful black! �" And I am stricken with an aura of azure and dust, of confusion and mortality. 
Faces become stories and these stories become fractional facts; stories based on appearance and prior knowledge.

There once was a women who knew all too well of the sickly tricks which plague the night, her pale, white countenance smelt of the auburn leaves of fall; the crisp incubation within a summerset sun �" Summerset upon the grave of all that remains of beauty. She never spoke of the bags under her eyes, how her visions of heaven kept her up at night; she required these visions, how they always depicted a glorious staircase going up and everyone’s on it �" and me, I’m on the edge, falling, being pushed off �" except she. She is alone in a dark, somber cloud, her pale face, short skirt and unforgiven sins cannot be seen by the saved, except me, I understand the black �" Sweet melancholy and loneliness, touch me yet again!
She knows not of me, yet I shed tears for her, thus is the curse of being eternally alert. My senses have developed a habit of numbing themselves during the day, in the midst of the masses, the middle and the fray. 

My days have become blurs of partial memories and incomplete observations �" But my nights! Oh my nights are the victims of obsessively acute senses and an overactive and rather wan mind. Has it really been that long? Has it really been eight months since last I slept? Dreamt of the golden sunshine of my own Amontillado, my own dark perceptions incased within the infinity, the glorious infinity of the mind!

Fatal Familial Insomnia; they’ve given it a name and they’ve produced a reason, but a man with a certain promise of short life cannot help but think that he has been prematurely damned �" Cursed and unforgiven! �" in the eyes of god. I dare not search for religion; I need not further inspiration for my nightly perversions of reality.
Many a night I see the ground quake and a bulge develope in front of me, behind my drawer and around my room; doomed is the word and red is the color �"The malevolent and firm grasp of darkness!!
Many a night do I see the bulge burst, only it is no longer an extension of the ground, but an extension my vertebrae, of my spine, of my being �" The tempest of absurdity and cowardice do cradle me so! �" And soon this agitation, this bulge ejaculates the demons of the women, of my doctor, my mother…… mine are nowhere to be found.
Many a night does this fright result in a numbing, tingling feeling in my left arm and a barbaric chest pain. 
Many a night does this result in a rotating state of mind �" Lapses in black’s firm grip. �" And a deepening, infinite darkness and a short time out of mind.
I awake to faces, some are worried, and others smirk with the slight indifference of “I’ve done this before.” 
They’ve given it a name �" A panic attack- 
I’ve given it a purpose.

What sins have I committed that fate bid me suffer the night? This torment is in fact perpetual yet sporadic in its manifestations. I fear the morrow for what it might bring �" Oh the severity of my present condition! Lost in a labyrinth of darkness! 
On a very peculiar night I saw the wall turn liquid �" Oh impartial sanity! Oh careless mind! �" upon further inspection it bore the semblance of a glorious mural �" A man, a cavalier riding an ancient steed whose pupils bore the ferocity and intensity of the fires of hell! I blink and the rider is gone along with my stable state of mind; the room is gone for I am outside my dwelling and it is ablaze. The beast is beside me and I feel its hot breath �" Breath of malignancy, of fowl intent! Breath of Hades! �" And it insists I ride it �" I curse and damn the black! What visions, what perversions! Where is reality?
I mount the beast and we prance on the doorstep of calmness and rationality; better it should rue me! Suddenly the beast makes haste and as consequence of its speed the grass becomes a blur, the wind becomes a howl and the shutters of my soul clang shut for I see the beast’s intentions. My throat becomes a loft of screams, of anxiety as I wail in fear of our destination �" Towards the fire! Towards the infinite darkness, the colossi that is the black! The fires of restless nights, of stolen dreams (though they bear no light, no clarity!)! I feel my physical existence cannot bear the shock �" Reality why must you deceive me so?
Loud and coarse is the sound coming from the hooves of the steed, I plea for a pause, an equilibrium, some balance! �" Whilst the wind gusts through my ears, whilst my perceptions mock my idiocy �" This isn’t real! Into the fire, into the black and nothing is seen, or heard, except the trampling of four ghostly hooves upon a nonexistent floor. I am weary and I am fickle as I collapse over my own weight �" A lapse in thought, black; time out of mind.

“Fatal Familial Insomnia” or rather “Fatal Familial Dementia” as I like to call, it is an inherited autosomal disease and only twenty four families are known to carry it worldwide. The probability of obtaining this demon that hell brought is fifty-fifty �" Cursed be the fates! �" and all else is fancy quibble; all for naught! Just to explain a mutation within a protein, they’ve given it a name �" Asparagine-178 �" but I see it as malevolently intangible, a dark cloud over the azure ocean �" Tranquil and passive and beautiful! - that was once my soul, my very essence. 
They divided my damnation into four stages of insane occurrences within the body, perversions in the perfect harmony that is the human body; soul.
Rather than name and describe the four doors of death I’ll just state that I am near the closest one to it. My mind is a fragile oasis of sorts, - Suspect to gales and thunderstorms �" for the body has deteriorated beyond usefulness and practical purpose. 

I cannot hope to describe the events or the sequence of feelings that have led to my dutiful abhorrence of all things I once loved; running has become associated with despair �" my utter cowardice as I feverishly flee from the night - the terrors, the inhuman suffering �" rather than face it. Painting, reading and linguistics have all fallen to the despair and black and dark tunnel that further disassociates happiness from those once happy things. Still I retain some humanity; though it has become a rather visceral and easily agitated thing, my love of music �" Which has become rather limited; gone are the great composers and the love for the classical heaven they represent; so long Ludwig Van, Alexandrov, and even Mozart; how I lament for thee! �" is barely retained in my enjoyment of Mr. Dylan. Though I can only bear the very apex of his musical essence, Blonde on Blonde �" If only god knew of such perfection, he would renounce his heavenly throne; the sweet mercury sound of the interlude harmonica in “Visions of Johanna”- precious sapphire waves of sound, intensify the room with your greenish hue, be it a shriek of dissonance, it is glorious and I see the world with eyes of aquarelle!
My present condition allows me a sixth sense, a sense of musical perception and I see Johanna silhouetted by those divine eyes of the lowlands �" Oh how she frolics and how she teases me with the visibility of her countenance; bid me suffer the night awhile longer! Sometimes I even feel the familiar sting of tiredness, of tranquility and I’m comfortable and tranquil and night sheaths her claws and I lay my head on her breasts �" See the queer little things: a crack on a wooden door, dust on an unused guitar, ants and other vermin surviving behind a drawer. I see a watercolor and it is blue and I see it drip into the floor. And I become a universe, ever expanding within the molecules of that azure hue.

Time has stopped, ceased to exist within the realm of my knowledge and my days become an empty hourglass and sunlight’s glorious intricacies become a blur, a single stroke in a Monet. 
Communication has slithered away from me along with time �" easily irritable and combative; may god have mercy on the beast! Still I fight to retain some humanity, some poetry, a soul; but my nights �" Dangerous, perilous and holistic they’ve become and meek and cowardly I have become.
I cannot fathom a scream, ejaculate a spec of existential intercourse �" See the room move the bed shed its external cuirass and become a griffon; rooms an endless sky of black, of nothing and everything, of blue and darkness! No griffon, suffer not my presence, allow my departure! �" Again the staircase, the immensity of the staircase comes to mind. Wind gusts past me as if I had offended her and all dreams of youth, of adolescence, of melancholy and rage rush past along with her and leave me in a state of loneliness.
And I grow violent �" tearing, punching, scratching, kicking, offending, crying, and biting �" Oh malevolent night, oh sadistic dementia, leave me be! Yet I am entangled by darkness then ensnared by dementia �" I see myself naked and laughing, clothed and crying, fetal and free; color abound, blue, green, and dementia! A gasp and I cannot breath, a swerve and I cannot stumble; some things are inevitable. I smell the distinct, docile yet impressionable scent of unkempt feathers, gushing blood and salty tears. �" Accept the black! Release all fervors! �" The body gives and is broken to pieces; some go north, others west and I am achieved in becoming an impression of life �" I feel it now, the cold, calloused hands of the black, the crude and crushing realization that a life worth nothing has been lost. 
The griffon is gone and so are the feathers, alas, the blood remains and I am a vessel of tissue and organ and bone again. Blood on my mouth and I’ve come to accept her. They’ve given black another name �" Death �" I’ve given her purpose.

Author's Note

Bash it.