Footsteps in the Night

The footsteps they haunt me, I hear them when I sleep, I hear them while I’m awake. They wake me while I’m asleep sometimes. Sometimes when I hear them I am not sure if I’m awake. It’s a ghostly form of self defeating anxiety that I alone created.

There are nights that I spend alone, all so alone and lonely, while my other half walks around upstairs and down stairs or around this big quiet house. Some nights I am not alone but still alone, no matter how close my other half sleeps next to me, being dead on the inside is a curse in itself.

Hearing them lets me know they are there. When I hear them I can’t sleep, when I don’t, I still can’t sleep. It’s like a crude awakening to hear them but even cruder if I do not, for I just wake myself. If there is no one there I hear the footsteps around the house, *click, click, click* as her high heels hit the floor. But no one is there, it is only me wishing and hoping to hear those footsteps. A footstep can mean everything. If they are fast, there is something wrong but if they are normal paced there’s usually no cause for concern. But a footstep means someone or something is causing that sound, and no matter how stressful it can be, I strain my ears while both asleep and awake just listening for the slightest sound of my soulmate.

That voice, sometimes I hear it speak, but sometimes it’s make believe. A creak in the floor or the wind on the house and I am fooled into thinking it whispers to me softly. That perhaps my nightmare has ended and I am not so alone, and that there is someone there who cares, someone to talk to, and someone to listen to. But when I awake I find that I am all alone. There is no warmth of any body near me. No one is around, no one cares, and there is no one to share this life with.

I am all alone and empty on the inside, some nights I don’t think I’ll be able to go on. There is no cure for this curse that I live and there is no remedy for the pain that I feel. At the realization, my stomach clenches and I feel nauseated. My blood pressure elevates and the anxiety hits me like a brick to the face. I fall to my knees and my body fails. I become very tired and ill from the thoughts in my head. This self created and perpetuated sickness, my plagued thoughts, are destroying me. I replay past events in my head, over and over, and I try to understand what went wrong, but I am just…wrong. The replay is unnecessary, I search for something that I missed, but I didn’t miss anything, it’s as obvious as it always was, I shouldn’t have done that, said that, or acted that way.

I am but a relic of a past life, my memories may not even be my own, they seem so distant now and I cannot recall what it felt like before. Before that day, as there are many “days”, and each day of this nature that occurs causes the memories of my past life to fade away even further. I cannot recall much of anything, the memories I have seem to belong to someone else. Someone who was once happy. Someone who did not live in fear everyday. Fear of the unknown and fear of fear itself. Fear of being alone. And fear of losing everything they had.

Then there are doors. I hear them open and close. By the sound of each one I know what my soul mate is doing, I can trace the movements around the house. As I lay in this bedroom trapped inside of it in the corner of this huge house and trapped inside my mind, I begin to imagine what she looks like. The sliding of a screen door, the closing of a bathroom door and even how hard it was closed, the clank of a toilet seat, the sound of the water running; I am left to imagine in my head the visualization of my surroundings while I am locked away in my dungeon. I strain and I listen for she does not wish to see or converse with me. It’s as if I am blind, and perhaps I am, but not because I cannot see with my eyes.

I am a prisoner in my own house and a hostage of my own mind. My phone buzzes and my heart races. This could be a text from my soul mate telling me something I do not wish to read or it could be junk mail from someone that doesn’t matter. My heart races, do I open my phone and read? My phone is a murderer of hopes, dreams, and desires. Seldom do the words come across that I would like to see. My phone has become an instrument of pain, some days I think I would be better off without it.

I don’t look this time, but rather I shut it off, and go to sleep. But I awake 15 minutes later in a panic, what if she texted me, what if she told me something I’d like to hear. I turn my phone on, read the text, and I feel even more anxious and sick than before. It wasn’t what I wanted to read at all. I feel hopeless once again. I try to sleep but I can’t, my body sweats, my mind races, my heart palpitates, and I do not know how I’ll survive another minute. I cannot accept things how they are now, my body is becoming weak and my mind is destroying me like a virus. Why can’t things be like I remembered them, so peaceful and so perfect. And that’s when I answer my own question, “because what I remember was but a dream, and the reality is, I am alone…I was always alone…”