Post by Robbie Hope on Mar 16, 2021 21:55:20 GMT -6
I don’t remember who I used to be.
What was the world like before the pandemic? Who did I know? Who did I love? Who did I live for? It feels so ancient, a time buried deep in my memories. It’s difficult for me to process my emotions, because I went so long without feeling anything at all.
This city, Las Vegas, feels so foreign to me most of the time. But there are moments when I’m walking along the deserted roads, looking high up at the towering steel, and I can picture the lights and the energy that used to permeate from these structures. It was a simpler time, but this was an oasis of luxury and beauty, stature and prominence, wealth and debauchery. My memories of these times have been kidnapped and held for ransom, and I don’t know how to get them back.
But I still feel that familiarity sometimes.
Maybe it’s the shadows they create. I see myself on the cement, and my mind wanders. I miss the poisons I flooded my body with, the escapism it provided me, the weightlessness as I floated about the clouds. I see a sign that reads Sapphire, and the rush of memories come flooding back. The disco strobelights. The pulsing in my heartbeat, synchronized with the bass drop. The smoke lingers in the air and I see a silhouette of a body I recognize. The curves, the arches. But as the etchings of her face draw nearer, she is pulled back into the unknown. And I wake, once more, in the confines of the cold cell.
The four white walls.
The demon in the white coat.
He shakes a cup, the pills rattling inside.
He tells me to swallow them.
“I want to go back,” I tell him.
“There is no going back,” he replies.
I feel like I have no other choice. I have to do what he says, because I’m afraid of what it will feel like to be in this room without this mental escape. I fear what they’ll do, if they haven’t already done enough.
“I’m not taking them today,” I asserted, trying to convince myself that I actually had a choice. His laugh roared as it ricocheted off the walls. “I just want to know who I am again.”
He gripped me by the back of my hair and wedged his fingers between my teeth. I thought about biting down, but I was too scared of what my punishment would be. He shoved the pills into the back of my throat and held my nostrils shut, his palm covering my mouth. I felt the bitterness of the oval-shaped medication break through the defensive armor of my throat, ingesting them whole until they landed in my stomach.
“That’s all you had to do, Elisabeth. See, that wasn’t so hard.”
Elisabeth.
Well, that’s a start.