Page 100 of Sick Bargain

A voice.

A memory.

A moment.

The happiness my dad experienced on the very day he swallowed so many pills they killed him.How did that happen?

My brother, who struggled for so long and eventually hung himself when Gregory Malone got to him.How did that happen?

My brother, who was fine one day and not the next, cut his wrists and bled out on his own gravesite.How did that happen?

What will my ending be? What will my method be?What will I regret in my final six minutes?

It’s not fear that overcomes me, it’s sadness. Sadness for lives unlived and lost. Missing time and a scrapbook that finishes early, too many blank pages at the end. It’s grief for so much carnage, and pain because loss hurts deeper than anything. It’s a sad determination that wants me to end this curse to protect Soren because, other than Krypt, he’s the person I care most about. Hate and love mingle between me and Soren, but evenour hatred is founded in a sense of love, and we both share that with Selena.

I have a family. A brother, a sister, a best friend, a Krypt. Things to fight for and a reason to exist. I’m important and wanted.

With the end of the tunnel and a corner upon me, the mood changes. Sadness turns to fear when my name hisses through the hollow pits, meeting my ears at different times in differing tones. My temples prickle and my throat goes dry, knowing this stretch will test my durability. It’s beckoning my sanity and wanting to strip it away, but I’m stronger now because Krypt strengthened me. He taught me to live in fear, and now I’m partly comfortable here.

I free you, Remiel.

Freedom means death, and I’m not ready to die. My mangled flesh and scarred body have to mean something. The pain of it can’t be for nothing, and if life and death are ahead of me, offering themselves as pretty options in a ‘this or that’game, I pick life. I pick me. I pick Krypt and all the beautiful ways he’ll scare me. I pick selfish needs over protecting my family from the curse. Because I’m selfish now.

I’ve never been a strong person, but I want to fight. No matter how much it terrifies me. No matter how strong the pull of suicide tugs at me. Fear makes me crazy, so I smile at the darkness and peer through the shadows to see what they want to show me.

Shapes and movement. Ghosts and demons. Regrets from the past and regrets not yet lived. They’re all there, taunting me forward, trying to trap me in my madness. Because Iamfucking mad. No sane person does what I’ve done and feels how I feel, and I no longer care about right or wrong because those choices aren’t mine to make. They’re his. He gets to decide what happensto me and how it happens, and the only choice I get in the matter is how I react to it.

“Krypt!” I shout, listening to the warped version of my voice bounce back at me. “I fucking choose you! Free or not, you’re mine!” I laugh, crazed and pathetic, defiant about it. “Is this what you want? You want me to hope that you’ll pick me back? You’ll trick me into falling for you, and then you’ll kill me like I’ve wanted all along?”So poetic.

I failed Ophelia in her time of death, and now Krypt will fail me in mine.

But a surge of strength rises within me, and I shake the thought away. Krypt won’t kill me. He’ll keep me.

I laugh harder. It’s a weird sensation, tickling my throat and making my head ache. I can’t remember the last time I laughed freely, and with nothing but phantoms to hear me, I do it now. I laugh so hard the reverberation of it creates sinister music in surround sound. I laugh hard enough to cry, and when heaving sobs of riotous glee make me cough, I buckle forward and hack at the ground. I cough so forcefully that I fall to my knees, but I’m comfortable here. So comfortable, I sprawl out on my stomach and press my cheek to a cool puddle.

Everything settles. Silence. It’s a moment in time that carries weight because it’s the pivotal point of no return. It’s a choice I didn’t know I had.

TheMad Hatter said, ‘We’re all mad here.’

Einstein said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting different results.’

Alan Watts said,‘In madness lies sanity.’

William Shakespeare said inHamlet,‘Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t.’

Madness is of the mind. To experience true sanity, I must free myself from my mind. A full break. Shut it off and live without it.

Laughter feels so far away now.

The Mad House of Trigger Mountain breathes around me. Cool, damp air pants across my nape and lifts the hem of my shirt. It drips tears on my head and whispers promises of protection if I just stay here a little longer. It holds my hands from below, and I dig my fingers into its embrace, comforted by the way it cradles me.

I close my eyes and listen to it live. There’s history here, stories of love and loss, a decadent mingling of never and forever. It’s convincing. Trigger Mountain loves in a way that makes me want to stay. I could be here, living in the darkness with an abundance of nothing and a mind snapped free. It’s easy. Because ‘we’re all mad here.’

“Remiel.”

…but life is so much more terrifying, and finally, I’m picking me. I smile again.

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