Cloak of Skin

They say that eyes are windows, panes of glass to glance the soul through. A portal for that soul to map the world. But my soul is no cartographer and my eyes are tinted grey.

I thought that skin was the barrier to reality, like tissue paper wrapped around a concept to keep it safe. We can feel the buzz of existence right outside but are still contained within, a world itself but apart. Whole, until some cardboard cutout pierces through it with ill intent and we are reminded of our own fragility.

They should hear me now, the other concepts wrapped up in delicate things. They are only a whisper away and I am screaming. My own ears should hurt from the sound.

I feel that I could taste the panic if I tried hard enough. Though I think panic would taste more acidic than stale air.

But there is nothing.

I see things but it is all illusions.

I am grasping for everything, my hands clawing at the sheets but I cannot feel them.

The air feels like it is ripping through my throat but it’s caught halfway on phantom fingers that don’t belong to me.

I should hear its manic laughter, the demon that holds me captive, but I hear only barely-there static.

I am still part-way asleep and a nightmare has been given life. With its first breath it chose torment. It has taken every part of me that makes me real and twisted until I am unsure I ever was real to begin with.

My eyes are windows for it to shatter and replace with darker things, hateful things.

My skin is now a cloak for it to wear, numbed by the impossibility housed within.

My ears have been hollowed out, the echo of past sounds reverberate but nothing new can find the entrance anymore.

My voice is caged but I still slam it against the bars in pitiful attempts, desperate to be heard.

The only thing that is still mine is taste, though it is barely a mockery, preserved so I can try and swallow the fear as it drowns me. Though that is only another illusion, the flavour of intangibility.

The mind that hides behind that tissue-paper facade has split itself asunder and the two halves have declared war.

Half of her is captivated by the nightmare, a puppet to the dream, morphed into the torturer.

The other half is her witness, a beast caught in a trap, gnawing at its own limb to try and be free.

It is a moment and yet a life-time, tied up in string, the spider's-web of sleep. A noose that blinds and chokes and deafens until all we are is numb and afraid and certain that we have awoken, only to be reminded that even that we have failed to manage.

And though eventually, sleep will be shucked off like the too-tight shell of a hermit crab, wakefulness will bring with it a certainty of our lack of control. It will be a bliss to see and hear and feel again, to taste something real but it will be soured with the question of how fragile this reality is. And the silence of the reply.

Like a concept wrapped in tissue paper just waiting to be pierced.