Waves of Illusion

Ethan, sweet Ethan.

Between the rumble of the floors and the incoherent conversation of two star-crossed codependent parents, he can’t think. He can’t breathe without inhaling the stench of resentment. He can’t sleep without stirring to the sound of his mother’s cries, the ones she saves for the middle of the night when she thinks her sweet boy won’t hear. She’s wrong.

Ethan can’t sleep because he hears her. He hears everything, sees everything. He hears it in her sighs, in her long deep breaths, in her monotonous replies. He sees it in the solemn stare over cold coffee and burnt toast. He wishes that for fifteen minutes she would revert back to the triumphant mother he once knew. He wishes it was like it used to be, before him.

Ethan sits in the stairwell. Intertwined insults fill the place he considers home, clinging to the walls and piercing them like bullet fragments diving deep into the structure. Invisible bullets are more painful than tangible ones. They last forever. Every time he walks down the hallway one harassing fragment releases from its bitter alcove, screaming through his head as if to say, “Remember me? You’ll always remember me.”

So he sits. He waits until he sees the malevolent shadow disappear. He waits until he hears the last audible footstep, the closing of the complex door, spitting him out like an exorcism. He’ll be back, he always comes back.

Ethan sighs, stands up, and enters the unforgiving domicile. Silent steps into his bedroom where the words won’t haunt him, silent closing of the door, silent barricading to keep the demons out. He only wishes she could disappear into his room with him, forgetting the world and everything that goes with it. And if they can’t disappear inside his room together, he wishes they could run away. Only, the demon is like heroin. She can’t keep him away. She wants to, but her addiction is resilient, and her drug is invigoratingly sweet.

He hears her slither through Fort Ethan, wishing it was sturdier. He feels her crawl into his bed, slipping under the covers. He’s staring at the wall, half cringing and half relieved that she’s here. He loves her so much.

Her tear stained apology isn’t enough to absolve their nightmare. Her desperate promise to get clean and detox the devil is one Ethan has heard a million times. He turns to face her and lets his mother ocean engulf him in waves of sorrow, regret, apologies, and devotion. She spills out her sea, surrounding him in all of her emotion, pulling him into her riptide. She is his heroin, he only wishes she was the other type: his Heroine.

He falls, silently, willingly. They fall asleep in their momentary solitary asylum, drifting away from the landmass of reality, losing all fear and heartache, their bond solidified even through tragedy. They float, further and further until the whole world evaporates into the mist of illusion, longing for the dryness of freedom they so desperately need.