Scream

Alberto’s finger bled. He hadn’t realized, but he had been biting his nails for the whole bus journey.

In a complete state of dissociation, Alberto left his body unoccupied. Left to its own devices, the body drew upon its muscle memory to continue the function of the disconnected shell it had inherited, feeling lost and unguided, and for one reason or another, it found biting the nails to be a soothing practice that pacified the soul of its owner.

He turned his head from side to side, leveraging himself to get a better angle of attack on the helpless nails. As his neck muscles tensed, the veins around them bulged out of his skin; his lips flared wider with every bite, revealing his inflamed gums more and more, as saliva drooled out of the corner of his mouth. His yellow-stained teeth would clamp down on an unsuspecting helpless nail and, holding firm, the neck muscles would jerk, throwing his head to the side and ripping part of the nail from the finger. It was a heinous scene to witness; a massacre of the body.

One stubborn nail tried to defy its vicious aggressor and showed resistance. Alberto must have bitten too deeply into that nail and now the slightest touch would erupt a sharp screeching pain that would run through his finger, sending cold chills down his spine. This pain brought Alberto back to the realm of the conscious as he re-entered his body and became aware of himself and his surroundings on the bus that was currently taking him to work.

Alberto looked at the finger that was screaming with pain as the nail was hanging loosely, and he thought about what to do. He remembered that someone had once told him that the best thing to do was to get some scissors and cut as much of it as possible and then wrap the finger in plaster, so as not to snag it on anything and avoid any unnecessary pain. Alberto brought his mouth once more over the loose nail, surrounding it with his pointy clutches, closed his eyes in anticipation of the pain, clamped his teeth firmly, and ripped his head violently away from his hand, dragging the stubborn nail with it.

That cold pain ignited once more in his fingertip, but it was quickly canceled out by the warmth of the blood now rushing through it, as it streamed out of the corner of his nail.

The wound stung in the cold fresh air. This was Alberto’s first thought on the walk to the office from the bus stop but had come to him at the end of the walk when he was surprised to see that the office was in sight. He couldn’t remember any of the walks up to this point and couldn’t even remember getting off the bus; dissociated again, his body dragged him to where he intended to be.

When he walked into the office and arrived at his cubical, his desk was a mess. Papers were scattered chaotically around the surface with barely legible equations written all over them, a coffee cup stained brown on the inside with an intensity only possible from not being washed for a long time, and a tangerine peel at the desk’s edge, hardened and curled up, leaving yellow stains on the paper beneath it. Alberto felt a stranger to himself as he did not recognize the person that left the desk in this state the day before. He was completely separated from his own sense of being. He sat down at the stranger’s desk and began to work in a manner in which time passed neither quickly nor slowly, as he wrapped his consciousness once more in that familiar comforting cocoon of delusion and neglect.

When the workday finished, Alberto packed his bag and left to do the reverse journey from the one he had done earlier that morning. The cold air attacked his wounded finger again, now surely infected. A pulsing sensation ignited in the fingertip and Alberto suddenly became aware of his exhausted heartbeat. He felt pity for it, as it was working so hard, but it was all in vain.

He realized at this moment that he did not want this return journey to end, he did not want to go back into his apartment where he would have another typically unremarkable night and wake up tomorrow morning to a screaming alarm telling him to begin again.

If you don’t confront those demons in your head, they’ll get you, eventually. You can pump yourself with all the distractions and vices you can possibly muster, but at the end of the day, when you return to your hole and shut the rest of the world out, it’s just you and those demons, and when you’re in that place, no one can hear you scream.