Suspended, unable to move. I don’t know what to do. I can’t react fast enough because I don’t know how to react. My mind is a sinking ship, flooding with dark, cold water and I can’t see anymore. I am blinded, quickly trying to use my feelers to see around this eerily familiar place. I’ve never gained and lost so much so fast. It’s like mental whiplash, but my heart’s involved too, and now it’s being penetrated by a broken rib bone, slashing right through the main valve. Great, now I’m bleeding.

Music is drowning out my ear drums and I am now deafened. Unable to hear the truths and lies, and too stupid to decipher even the smallest of them. Deafened, I watch mouths in motion, hoping for answers but just seeing oral distortion. How did it get this bad, and when?

I try to use my gut to feel, to learn, to understand this place where I have landed. But my gut is submerged in hydrochloric acid, burning and sizzling and popping away like its being fried in itself. The only sensation is the white hot agony I feel when I’m lying on the bathroom floor, arms wrapped around my legs in a desperate attempt to will the ceiling to cave in on me. Gut? What gut? My intestines have eaten it, and my intuition, alive.

I open my mouth to get a taste, but all I can taste it the same bittersweet flavor of the unknown. There’s a minty tingle that envelopes the other flavors, yet it’s soon gone, replaced by an overwhelming bitterness that I can’t even stand. How did something so good spoil so soon? How did something so tasteful turn into such a rotten nightmare? Flavorless oral distortion. I’m hopeless.

And smell. You know what they’ve said about smell: smells like trouble. Trouble wafts thick through this air, almost thick enough to cut through it with a razor, slicing trouble in half with a clean cut. But trouble is never cleanly cut; always leaving behind ragged edges and uneven surfaces. But its stench is thick and potent, easily discernable by my nose, which hasn’t failed me yet… right?

Stuck, and powerless, with no sight, no taste, no feeling, no sound, and only the heavy cloud of trouble that I have inhaled copious amounts of by now. But how do I get out of this weary, miserable place? Misery loves company and I can see I have some visitors. Off into the distance, I can barely make out blurry shadows, shimmering like tar puddles against a flicker of light. They’re shaped in all-too-familiar silhouettes, but nonetheless, figures I do not want to recognize or see here, in this personal h*ll. Why must they find me here? They already invaded the happy place, and now they are lurking in disguise in this darkness.

So I will wait and let them eat me alive. Let their razor sharp teeth typewrite menacing words into my skin. Let their powerful odor suffocate my olfactory senses. Let their cold, slimy touch slither over my bones, enveloping me in a sick, stinky caccoon. Let their sharp, shrill melodies drown out all sound. Let their cold, skeletal hands cover my eyes and blind my sight so I can’t see what’s coming. Let their piano wires string me up, raise me up, hoist me high into the sky, visible for the entire audience to see. Step right up and see the human marionette, they’ll all cry. And we’ll all fall down.