POSESSED BY DEMONS. GET HELP.

It makes sense now.
For fucks sake, I don't expect it to make sense to you.
But it's really starting to make sense to me now....

"What are you saying now?" says a voice to the side...

And I suddenly notice that I'm duct taped to that same hospital bed again.

Was it really a week ago?

The world has gone insane...

Fuck, there was an ugly vibe going on. Another person's vomit was drying in a patch at the bottom of my shirt. People were throwing punches in the mosh pit, and when they tired, hung on the outskirts spitting back into it...

Everyone just had this look in their eyes that said they would not go home satisfied until they had hurt someone, and I just wanted to go home. I know when I'm not welcome...

Was it really a 9 years ago?

I have a hard time getting the details across... there was an ugly vibe going on. Or maybe the ugly vibe was just inside my head. I needed to sit down. Faces glared at me. I didn't mean to be in anyone's way. I know when I'm not welcome. I just needed to rest a bit. Were the faces even on people? It seemed like the faces were glaring out the walls themselves, like the walls wanted to devour me.

"Oh God I love you don't eat me!"

She bursts out the bathroom door, clutching her arm. I saw what looked like smoke but also shimmered like oil flowing out of her arm and wafting up to the warehouse ceiling. Her blood dripped on me. She was with some one (was she?) and he began to scream in my face.

"WHY AREN'T YOU HELPING? SHE'S BLEEDING TO DEATH! IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HELP GET OUT OF MY WAY!"

He was screaming so much. It made me feel bad. I never meant to be in anyone's way. I know when I'm not wanted. I climbed inside myself, and it got darker as I burrowed backwards into the wall. Except I wasn't burrowing into the wall. I was traveling in "the direction you cannot point to". It got cramped... I was too big, and I still did not know how to make myself smaller. I couldn't breathe. Did my heart just stop?

I couldn't breathe.

I gasped.

I was in the floorboard of a moving vehicle. A cop car. They had crammed me into the floorboard and had their feet on me. I couldn't move my arms or legs, why couldn't I move? I begged them to stop stepping on me, that I couldn't breathe. They pretended I wasn't there. Was I really there? I couldn't even tell anymore.

I couldn't breathe.

I gasped.

Not much better. I was back at the party, and people were looking at me funny. I decided to go to the bathroom for some water. I know when I'm not welcome.

I looked in the mirror and I was covered in blood (or was it puke?). Was it her blood? It pooled at my feet. It stretched out in a hundred directions, it was spelling out words. Dirty words, words so dirty I can't even force myself to recall them.

And then the singing began.

I had to cover my ears. It wasn't even words, the sounds just hurt. It was horrible and frightening. The ceiling dripped her blood on me, the walls shook. The only thing that made sense was my reflection. I stared at myself, frozen, until the singing stopped, the walls again stilled... then a noise distracted me. But it wasn't a noise.

I felt the sound of a key, turning in a lock. And my arm hurt. I looked down and there was a bite mark in the center of my right arm. My blood, her blood was pooling at my feet. And it was so silent.

"Oh God I love you don't eat me!"

And there, on the bathroom wall that was suddenly immeasurably tall, shattering the skyline, words were there, so big I could not comprehend.

Spelled in blood (my blood? hers? whose?) was a simple, powerful statement:

"POSSESSED BY DEMONS. GET HELP."

I turned to my reflection for guidance. I (or my reflection) had such a disarmingly hopeless expression on his (her?) face, tears involuntarily began to roll down my cheeks... And just as suddenly, my reflection blinked out.

I was invisible, And the singing started again.

...then just as suddenly

I was reading an email from someone from my past that had just recently found me on Myspace. She reminded me who she was then remarked:

"I was looking over your profile, and you seem really interesting now. You certainly hide your demons well."

I replied back:

"Demons are just excuses for people who can't take responsibility for the darker aspects of their personality..."

"Oh come on." said the cop, "Do you believe in demons or not? You've been howling and screaming for like 4 hours, and now you expect me to trust you're better?"

I couldn't move my arms. Oh, ok. I'm at the hospital again, duct taped to the bed with the cop there. I don't like this part. I wanna be somewhere else...

"Oh, don't go comatose on me again, you little punk!" laments the cop, "I swear to God I'm putting you in a cell as soon as you get back!"

But I (and/or?) he was already gone. I(?) was in the dark place again. Not that I could count what was in the dark place as actually being me.

When I was younger, I could stare at myself in the mirror until everything else would melt, smoke drifting to the ceiling where it would condense into blood that would drip down, pool, and someplace new would arise from the pools. I would suddenly be somewhere else.

It started simply, exploring every corner of the mirror when I was little. Okay, if I turned my head this way, I can see out the door. Open the medicine cabinet door and I could see down the hall. Still the same. I would experiment with multiple mirrors, just to see if I could finally catch the point where the mirror world and the one I lived in differed.

One night I found it.

When I was a little boy, I had found some girl's clothes at the bottom of a box my dad had bought at a garage sale. I hid them at the bottom of my toy box, and in the middle of the night, I would dress myself and clumsily put on make-up. Then I would go back to my experiment. The girl that was me would scan the surface of the mirrors, looking for something different, something They on the other side had forgotten to hide. After months of this practice, they slipped up, and I saw something I wasn't supposed to see.

The next day I begged my parents to let me get baptized. I destroyed the box of girly things.

But my parent's had bigger problems. Over the summer, they both spent stints in mental hospitals, and decided to divorce.

Not to take too much credit, but I may have broken my world.

...but 7 months ago

I was looking into another mirror. The piercings were the same, the eyes were the same. Was I a girl? We were at a cliff that looked exactly like the end of the world.

"We should jump off!" said my reflection, and his/her eyes sparkled.

"What time is it, really?" I wondered.

"Oh don't go into that shit again", said the cop. "You've been asking me what time it is every 10 minutes! Wait, where you going now?"

But everything was gone again.

They say that when it happens, the demons have to devour your flesh. They eat your entire material form...

Like the scene in Jacobs Ladder, when the chiropractor says you can look at it two ways; as demons ripping your life apart, or as angels freeing you from material concerns.

When I was young, the big news item of the day was subliminal messages in rock music that turned kids towards Satan. They didn't know the half of it.

"Speaking of subliminal messages...", I think two days ago after sinking another ball at the pool table in the break room. The television has a documentary on Harry Houdini, escape artist, paranormal debunker... Interspersed alongside the plot, however, is an auction where they are selling off Houdini's prop collection: keys, handcuffs, lock picks, etc.

So as they describe his life, they are simultaneously adding up his posthumous worth. Talk about a subliminal message.

I tell this to Amy Feral, repeating it because she is now 60% deaf from a beating she received from German Police. I'm nursing what will undoubtedly be a permanent scar, and my eye is probably gonna be black for a few days. She called me from a movie theater, she was getting a beer from the concession stand during the slow part of the movie.

"I just can't concentrate on this movie," she laments. "I'm having a hard time concentrating on anything after the beating."

I grunt concurrence through a sip of beer, as I sit in the bathtub.

"No really," she said, "these guys were professionals. A 400 year police-state tradition. I feel like my insides are made of glass, yet they didn't leave a mark..."

"Well," I reply, "I can't speak for you, but this whole sudden lack of concentration is just an amplification of my normal dysphoria for the world. Commercials, television announcers, jingles, mascots, announcements. Infernal symbols, I can feel my body rejecting the noise like an infection..."

"Well", Feral says,"nothing like a good old-fashioned beat-down to turn down the volume on all the unimportant stuff..."

"Well, one thing," I chuckle, "if all else fails, at least it got me to stop thinking about..."

...then just as suddenly

I'm back at the cliff at the end of the world. Staring at my reflection. I (we) decided we didn't want to talk to anyone anymore and found a place to be alone with each other.

"Give me your hand," (s)he said.

Days before this, at Emo's (when was this?), a punk kid called out my name and insistently asked me "So what's it like in Hell, Reverend Ralf? What's it like? You know who's doing this?"

...as I type this right now (now?), I feel my spine tighten.

(S)he brought my arm up to it's mouth, and bit me.

There was a crunch, like the sound of a key in a lock.

And I(?) was bleeding. Was I the girl? Was I a girl? The eyes are the same, the piercings are in the same place. When I draw myself, that's all I see. Eyes and mouth. Just a line for the nose, ignore the size of it. This giant nose, now even larger and busted all over my face. What was happening?

"OH GOD I LOVE YOU DON'T EAT ME!!!"

"Oh, back in the real world, eh?" the cop says.

Everything has stopped. The ceiling was spinning a little however, vaguely resembling the Gustave Dore etching with the angels spiraling to infinity.

"It took Thorazine", insisted the cop, "but I finally got you to behave. I'm gonna get you loose from this bed, and we're going to your cell. Any false moves, and I shoot you dead. You have seriously freaked me out tonight."

I shook my head, got up and let the cop shackle my hands again behind my back.