Ink nightmare

The story begins with a person waking up, all he knows is that he has a daughter. He's in a dark place somewhere he is quite sure he hasn't been in before. It's like a disfigured landscape, like shreds of memory onto hills made in faded ink. The whole picture is bleeding dark, almost black, green ink. It's sickening, the man is sick of this and he knows this. He wanders around until he starts recognising some of the things shredded in the ground. He starts recognising his life, his apartment, his daughter, his kitchen. He runs and chases for fragments of her in the pieces of memories and eventually gets into one.

And it's darker than before. He's in his apartment, he’s guessing that this is some important moment, but can’t quite place it, it’s… long ago. It’s a sad moment, one he’s not sure he wants to remember. He walks around, half trying to find his daughter, half trying to figure out who she is, or even, who he is. There is the living room, the picture is falling to the left, dissolving as someone spilled bleach all over it.

He knows that his is where it happened, whatever that was. He feels like something was said here. The walls were painted in angry strokes with dry, dense ink; those were yelling manifested in canvas, angry, disappointed ones.

She wanted more, he thinks without knowing what he’s referring to.

He moves a chair, ink staining his hand, it isn’t solid. He sits, his body melting into the chair. Then he sees it: a long shadow in the corner of his eye. He turns around. His heart beating as hard as it could without stopping. Of course there was nothing when he turned around, but he felt.

He felt something with that shadow, and it haunted him. He was exited, he was afraid. He wanted to run, but he wasn’t sure if away of it or towards it.

He needed to find his daughter, she was the only thing he knew, so he goes wander again. In one of the bedrooms, or what it resembles a bedroom, he finds another shred of memory: the tiniest of the locks, a baby’s lock, hair brown as his own. He follows the memory and he finds another landscape: a hospital, he knows this is where his baby was born, back when nothing wrong had happened at all; but he couldn’t remember what was that.

He finds his footprints in the hospital’s blank and clean tides, stains on the canvas of his memory, only growing darker as he approaches. He was the one that tainted that memory. As he followed his own steps of the past, the floor followed right below the sole of his shoes. 

And he sinks.

He falls into darkness.

He flies.

It is an airplane. This was the first moment he realized he had done something wrong. He now felt as it was wrong, at the moment he was happy. It was another happy memory tainted by his current self. He was the wrong.

Inside the plane, he was sitting beside his daughter. She was small and chubby, about three years, her hair long and framing her little face. But she had nothing for a face, nothing or a blur, or maybe it was something incompressible. He feels guilty because there is a person on his other side. And he wanted to hold that person’s hand. It was wrong.

This was supposed to be a family trip to fix things before she cancelled, so then it was only the both of them. It wasn’t supposed to meet Him there. They should never had meet again, even after near a decade, because it still hurt, it still was felt, even when he had his family.

He approaches the figure right next to the him on the plane, it was nothing more than a cluster of stains with the smell of algae of Japanese ink; even when the man couldn’t remember the face of that person, it still smelled like Him.

He gets closer. He wants to touch the figure but he’s afraid, afraid and guilty, but the temptation and the wanting on his fingertips is by far stronger. He cups the figure’s face and it faced him. It starts dripping ink. All goes black in a second. The figure became the shadow in his face and engulfed him whole.

The black in his vision went deeper in fear. The smell of algae intoxicated him as the knot of guilt closed his throat.

He regains his sight a moment later, still unable to breath. Now he’s at the beach. This a different trip, the feeling of time indicated it was more than two years ago. The memory, disfigured and deformed as the previous, makes him fell different. No guilt, no fear, not even the mixed want and despair he felt when the shadow came for him. He stares and his empty face as he remembers the feeling of nothing he felt in that moment, watching as his daughter, merely an infant, and her mom play on the wet sand.  In the memory, he stares at the woman and he feels nothing. They hadn’t talked in a week, she was busy and he was unemployed at the time, he took care of his daughter as good as he could. There were moments the woman needed more of him than he could give, his was one of those; she had asked too much, she had put his daughter in between and stopped the fight before it began.

He backs from his blank memory face and keeps receding. He knows what memory will follow this one, because he remembers what he thought at that time.

If the issue is the money, maybe his daughter would be better off without him.

The moment he pronounces the last word in his thought, the ink beach dies around him.

He is dying in this memory, and that’s not the worst of it.  This memory is in his own flesh, because he needed to experience this again; a part of him says that he deserves to suffer this again. The bathroom floor is black with dark red ink. His wrist are wide open while he laughs that his insurance was expensive enough to not to deny money in case of suicide.

As  little laugh comes out of his throat, he sees through the opening of the door the light pouring in. He left the light on. His daughter can’t sleep with the light on. She cries. He waits a minute or two. The woman hasn’t arrived, she always arrived at this time. This time she didn’t. He needs to go to his daughter. She’s only two, what the fuck was he thinking? Fuck the money. What was his daughter was going to do without him? The woman was never home. The woman was never for him neither.

It was painful. More now that he was doing this a second time. He would never know how, but he got up, wrapped his writs on towels and went to soothe his daughter.

Then he waited for the woman to come home.

She wanted the money, and he couldn’t give it.

Eventually they had to sell the car. Then the furniture.

Then, as he sat to wait for the woman, he feels like he was dying again. Not from the loss of blood but from the emptiness he felt.

So his current self realizes: he fears the emptiness, not the ink shadow.

He sees the blood soak the towels, he seeks warmth.

He finds it among ink, as everything before. Only lighter shadows let him recognize the scene watered in front of him. Warm hotel sheets, the smell of ink, long dark hair and broad shoulders. A smile he was glad to see again, dreams and a future he thought forgotten, alive again. But that was at night.

When the sun comes out, bleaching the ink of reality, all he feels is guilt. His daughter was sleeping in the next room, alone. He still wore the wedding ring while he lies in bed with another person, but  then the ring meant nothing more than malleable metal and harsh words. 

He walks into his daughter room. Her ink image sleeps, and the shadow looks over her. He doesn’t feel fear anymore, the guilt was still there but the shadow cares about her, that makes it better.

He could try, he thinks.

He wakes up.

There is long black hair brushing over his face, everything smells like ink, there is a real celling on top of him. Something moves beside him.

- Sorry I woke up – He says – I had to get those pages done for tomorrow.

The man is still somewhat disoriented, but he stares at His hands, ink stained.

- No, don’t worry. Better that you woke me.

- Having a nightmare? – He says, taking his hair out of the way, to lay at eye-level with the man.

- Yeah… - the man breathes. – Is she…?

- She’s five, don’t worry. You wake up at night more than her. C’mere. – He reassures, moving closer to the man.

He feels His arms wrapping around him. He’s still scared, but this is better. This is so much better.

 Escrito 06/05/17