The Main Character

All this blood on my hands, from crimes I never committed! The terrors that haunt my sub-conscience through the early hours of the morning, when the world is still dark. The streetlights beneath my apartment illuminate my room, barely. The screams wail in my ears of victims I’ve never met.

I’m not a great sleeper. Cursed with the ability to witness other people’s murders. I can’t sleep and it is starting to affect my everyday life. Sleep is impossible, being awake is worse when I can still see the images vividly before my own eyes. Like I was standing over these bodies myself. The buzzing of the nearby powerlines disrupts what would be the silence of the night. Screams, tears, veins exploding, the metal through the organs, the exasperated final breaths: it’s all I can hear ringing through my mind.

I can’t get my hands clean. I wonder if Lady Macbeth ever felt close to what I do now, the blood staining my hands red permanently. Banquo’s ghost-or the faces I’ve seen who are no longer humans walking around- is somehow a manifest of guilt. Guilt that the terrorists and psychopaths who committed the crimes will never have to pay the price I am.

I can’t control my own feelings. My mind is bleeding-flooding might be a better term in this situation- with anger that I have this stupid fucked up unnatural ability and I am guilty of crimes I haven’t done and I am mourning lives lost all across this dumbass planet we live on, and I feel scared of who and when will be the next death at someone else’s hands.

It never stops! The voices are there pleading in their final moments. I’ve seen a classroom full of seven-year-olds be slaughtered, a pleading wife to the man she loved, and plenty of strangers cross paths for the first and final time; caught in crossfires of wrong place, wrong time. I’ve seen parents harm their own children, corrupt officers of the law, blackmailed drug users, and everyone under the sun. The murders never end! The car crashes into the side of streetlights with their unaware passengers beside them. I can’t unsee the blood that now coats my hands with crimes I couldn’t do.

I am reaching a point in my life where I’m considering the best murder I could witness would be my first actual criminal offense. My victim would be the dead droopy eyes staring back at me in the bathroom mirror. Hopefully then I could find peace in eternal sleep.