(Self -- Harm)

Darkness slowly spread across the left side of his world and into the right.

Reality’s edges began to smear and bend as the nothingness cut at what he could see.

No one had dared to look at him on the commute home.

Back to his complex he’d crawled. Each step up the stairs felt like agony. Muscles cried out from exhaustion. Crusting, crinkling fabric refused to bend, resisting motion. Someone was shouting down the hall.

Masaru forced himself up his apartment floors, towards his home. He didn’t even consider taking the elevator. But the stairs suddenly reminded him of her.

Sayane had been gone for almost a week now.

He doubted the police had ever even filed a report.

Her door greeted him first, and Masaru found himself stopping.

A new heaviness had begun to suffocate him, and as he stood there once again facing the mass-produced composite barrier between her world and him, he couldn’t help but slump forward.

Wood met his forehead with a soft clunk, and Masaru exhaled the beginnings of a sob.

“Sayane?” he whimpered as his knuckles tapped along the door.

“Sayane, are you there?”

He knew the answer.

When nothing responded, Masaru slid down against the door and fought to contain the rising tears. A spasm seized the connections between his neck and jaw, and his face locked in a lamenting frown.

Everything itched.

It felt like he was going to be pulled through the concrete subfloor.

Darkness continued to spread.

“I h-hope that… wherever… you are…” he sniffed.

“You are okay. Or… at least… you are b-better than I am…” he cried.

“...Because I am n-not okay…” he whispered as the tears broke through.

“And there are very few people I’d wish this feeling on. So… please… be okay…”

Loneliness was smothering him, but he heard nothing but life in the echoes that surrounded him. Cries in the distance in one direction. Someone laughing in the other. Murmurs from a television just beyond the bricks and insulation. Life existed and continued all around him, but he would never connect with it. Safely sealed worlds of strangers told stories he’d never know.

Fabric scraped along the floor as Masaru forced himself to his door. Keys fumbled into position. Lock mechanisms shifted. His door opened, and he crawled into the place that was once his sanctuary, but now felt like his mausoleum.

Tributes to his old life hung on the walls, stood on shelves, and draped themselves over the couch.

A framed photo of Seoul from that one trip where he’d finally left Japan.

Numerous vinyl records calling back to decades when hope felt more believable.

T-shirts from decades-old local coffee shops that had closed down in the midst of economic struggle.

Everything was an artifact for a soul that was now in collapse.

Masaru reached his living room and allowed himself to melt into the weathered laminate floor. Sobs weren’t what fell from his spasming lips. Instead, weighted, drained, exhales burned out and leaked cries of anguish as Masaru tried to comfort himself.

Darkness continued to spread.

Walls bent in arcs of black. Sound muffled. It was all fading away.

A migraine began to build in the back of his ear canal, sending daggers of deafening quiet into his mind. The fan was too loud. Bulbs roared in their sockets. Circulating air pounded like aerial bombardment. All of those confirmations that life continued; that the structure held, even as he unraveled- they were all too much for him. Thread by thread, he was coming undone.

pick

Bites itched.

pick

Stenches seeped.

pick

Black fabric hung around his neck. It was once a tie. It was once a noose.

PICK

Panic broke his mind, and before he could think, he was ripping away his clothes.

CHICKKKKTTTTT

Soon, he was naked, trembling, and sick.

This skin didn’t love him anymore. He needed it gone. Pick. Not just the stains that coated it, but the top layer itself.

Shower water pressure activated, and Masaru climbed in before it had a chance to warm.

pick

chikt

chiktttt

chiiiiiikkkkkkttttt

Washitallaway

darkness was consuming Him

ANDITWASTHISFUCKINGEYE’SFAULT!!!

Blackness was closing in.

Breathing was nothing more than pulling sulfur into lungs and waiting.

Tremors shook every fiber.

He was soveryunwell

SOveryUNWELL

AndItWasThisFuckingEye’sFault

Teeth ground against one another as he contained the scream that was building.

PickAtTheEye

RipItOUT

Fingers wanted to resist, but their commands were coming from something shattered.

Slowly, they rose until they found the soft flesh of the lower lid.

pickateverygodforsakenmoment

If the eye didn’t want to come back to its correct position, Masaru would force it to.

With that, his fingers shoved inward.

Throat ligaments dropped, then caught. Toes curled. A hollowed, shallow moan locked in his mouth. Black streaks ran down his hands, mixing with the detritus and filth that was falling from his skin. Instinct tried to pull his hand away, but hate overpowered it, and Masaru cried out as dirty fingertips locked on their prize.

Pulls ignited white bursts across the darkness and clarity.

SCREAM. FUCpickKING SCREAM. NO ONE EVER HEARS THE SCREAMING.

He could feel his fingernails inside his eye socket. Abdominal walls failed, and intestines pushed through. But the eye wouldn’t move.

More black spilled down.

Everything was so very wrong.

Another tug.

Another wail.

SoVeryUnwell

Fibers and veins wrapped around his nails like vines. Pull. Pull. Pull.

PULL. PICK. CHIKTT.

Darkness only spread. No matter what he did, it only ever spread.

“Why won’t you just stay in place?!!!” he cried out as he forced the vomit to stop rising in his throat.

One more pull.

“Just GO BACK TO HOW YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE!!! Please!!!”

Something tore.

His eye shifted back, and his fingers slid from their sloppy cavities.

Masaru’s knees buckled, and he slipped backwards.

Hard plastic rose up to stop his fall, and his head struck the edge with full force.

Everything went white, then black, then grey.

Pain burned through his teeth and collected itself in the center of his skull.

Adrenaline calmed, and panic stepped aside for a new kind of panic, as logic returned to see the damage that had been done in its absence.

His eye was damaged. Nothing was clear on the left side of his world. Even though it was back in its correct place, it could not send a proper signal to his brain for translation.

Fiery pain burned along his face.

Something warm was running from his eye.

Vomit begged to expel itself from its prison of flesh.

Horror coated Masaru.

When he looked down, it only got worse.

“Oh, no… Oh gods, no,” he whispered.

There in the shower, as he looked upon the ruins of his body, he saw only a smeared, partially visible form.

His hand had all but vanished. In its place was nothing more than a faint streak of black that was allowing the light to pass through like it was nothing more than a linen sheet.

Streams of shower water flowed through his legs uninterrupted, splashing on the shower bottom with ease.

somethingwasverywrong

Though he did not fully know why, Ishikawa Masaru was fading into nothingness.

Tears turned to sobs, and the person who once was HIM finally broke.