Before We Lit It Up

1| After

There are claw marks on the walls. They're long and jagged, black, and seem deep – endless even. Like if I stare hard enough, they won't be claw marks anymore, but just brutal gaps, black holes that might one day finally swallow me whole.

They're the first thing I see every time I wake up, and the last thing I see before I fall asleep. And every morning, there is a new one, the same length, the same cracks around the wall, the same menacing gap in the wall, thin and long.

I would know, I put them there after all.

They're less a mark of destruction, and more of a plea, a way to mark it down, to give my thoughts an out. To make my thoughts seem tangible.

Real.

Vivid.

Show the panic and the monstrosity that grows in me every day has been growing in me every day for the past one-thousand-and-ninety-five days.

It's a sick, festering feeling. A feeling that never fails to make my heart clench, and bile rise in my throat as panic, rage, and helplessness claws at me. Claws. The irony isn't beyond me.

Except the marks on my wall are not real. No creature slashed the wall with wicked long and sharp claws. And outwardly, I'm not what society might deem a 'monster.' I don't have fangs, I don't have horns curving out my head, I don't have claws growing where nails should be. Most define a monster as something that appears alien.

"Scary."

"Ugly."

"Animalistic appearance."

So, I'm not a monster.

But I did put those claw marks there. With a steady hand, I have done each and every one. Painstakingly exact and vivid, that if anyone were to ever come into my room and see them – which no one has done for the past 1095 days – they would scream.

And I'd laugh.

I would laugh because I have been hearing that sound in my head for the past years. I haven't spoken a word, and sometimes, it's noticed, questioned, but never realized that it's because I am too loud in my head.

I am screaming in my head, clawing at a way to escape my mind, and it's always so loud. So to hear an actual scream again, because of me, would be hilarious.

In truth, no beast lurks in my room, and the marks on the wall are all painted. Fake. Fraud. A lie.

Just

Like

Me.

My room is exactly ten by fourteen feet, and the ceiling is precisely nine feet above my head. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 surfaces in my room, and every single one is covered in paint. The ceiling, the floor, the walls, the desk, the armoire. Everything is covered in paint since I've had three years to paint it. To memorize everything, dedicate it, and note it and engrave it to memory.

Swaths of light flicker over the walls from the moonlight streaming in through the shutter, but I know what's on the walls.

All similarly haunting, eerie, and depressing paintings. It's almost pathetic.

I run my gaze over the paintings and designs, the splashes of vibrant colors and deep hues, over and over again even though I already have them committed to memory. But I want to be able to remember them. Not because of what they all symbolize, but because painting has been the one thing that's kept me sane. Well, sane to a degree.