This Place Is Eating Me Alive

By James Winter

How do you cope when you're this low? My mental state left me incapacitated, broken and torn apart within. There was no place or person for me to turn to. Loneliness has become a part of my every day life, and depression is as normal to me as happiness is to someone else. Trying to come to terms with how my mind works is an uphill struggle which twists and turns with my emotions and dark thoughts. Constantly battling against this sickness, there must be a shred of hope in sight in which light will prevail and darkness will be whisked away with the wind. The untold tales of what have been were the release I needed to shake the shackles of the dark beast and welcome in the light. You are never alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Winter
• Release date: Jun 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781916405912

James Winter

29 years old from North London, currently living in Hertfordshire. Writing has always been a passion, so came along the birth of my first book This Place Is Eating Me Alive. Always looking to write something new and something outside the box, or write about a relevant subject matter. Author in the making, book 2 to follow suit in the coming years!

Book preview

Insane? Or At One?

Everything is laid out for us. We pretend that we can control everything that goes on around us and what our future brings. We force-feed ourselves into thinking that we are the beholder of our own destiny when fate itself is the one that maps everything for us without us realising.

On an daily basis, I look in the mirror and see myself with bags under my eyes and a droopy face from a bad night’s sleep; I’d wake up from dreams of me slipping away and fading off from everyone, covered in a hot-sweat and cackling to myself of my socially named ‘insanity’. In my mind I hear voices of reason and truth, never shouting, only quietly feeding me what I need to hear. Hair sticking to my forehead and cotton-mouth with a dreary gaze in my eyes, I turn the mirror over to concave the image reflected, and I look deeper into my eyes to find a hidden truth. I search but all I see is an iris, ocean blue colour and lines moving like electric volts charging around, and pupils darker than the night with an outline of the devils face with clarity.

My normal day will consist of watching others around me, examining how everyone acts towards others and inspecting everyone’s body movements, taking in their personality and how it changes when they see someone they don’t like or secretly have a soft spot for. I blend in to the background and take a step back, letting my mind run wild with thoughts that create answers that detour to something more and spectacular to think about, filling my day full of things to ponder about and question further into the next day.

Occasionally I’ll make an outburst, people will see my ‘weird’ side of me that’s intelligent enough to string a structured sentence together speaking the truth and baring the realities to everyone, leaving them shocked and confused at me, wondering if my daily uniform should be me wearing a strait jacket wearing only white and left alone in a padded cell. These questions and developments I come up with in my mind make me seek further towards the truth we’re covered up in a blanket from, but until such answers arise, I’ll remain quiet until spoken to, and from then onwards I can’t be held accountable for what I say or blurt out.

This medication I take every morning whilst looking in the mirror does nothing to me apart from make me feel slightly hazy for a short period of time, and then the buzz wears off. I’m told it’s to keep me from making stupid remarks, thinking ridiculous thoughts, and keeping my mind on a one track road; they must have underestimated my mind since it does none of the above at any point after I take them.

The more I learn each day, the more I’m considered to be an outsider and rejected, well, that’s how I feel anyway. I’m alone inside a room, with no windows or form of ventilation, only a floor, ceiling, four walls and a door; a door I can never get out of, a room that I feel I’m sanctioned to for thinking my thoughts and having my opinions. No one understands what I think or say, my mind has made things far too complex for others to understand from my mini-clip outbreaks, but everything reads and registers in there and makes perfect sense to me.

I’ve resorted to jotting down my thoughts because my psychotherapist tells me that it would be the best way to get things off of my mind and off of my chest, maybe draw the images that come into my mind in order to relieve room and carry on gaining more knowledge; in a sense like backing up a computer. Paper is littered around my room, it feels like I live in a library now with the amount of writing I’ve done and left for everyone to read at their free will; that’s if they want to read what an insane person has on his mind? They could step outside their precious little bubble and think for themselves and not be so scared, or answer a question with a question to put different thoughts that would pyramid out into something that could become so logic to them that it slaps them in the face.

I was once a believer that everything was two-dimensional, no matter what angle or how you looked at anything, it was two-dimensional. If you couldn’t see past it, how do you know there isn’t anything behind or past it apart from black nothingness? How can you vouch for another person’s eyes and trust that they don’t see the same thing as you? How do you know they’re real? I can still only answer one of those, and that is the latter question I frequently thought about. I’m never afraid to try new things and ideas, but I’ve never been able to come up with an answer or solution to my problem, even to this day.

Nowadays I accept that this isn’t true and it was just my mind running wild deep in thought, questioning everything from our personalities to our feelings, from ‘what if?’ to ‘I wonder why that is?’, everything as far as the question that will always remain on our tongues and thoughts until something logical can be accepted as an answer for the human race, our existence.

I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could ever make any sense of the scribbles I jot down on paper, they feel like encrypted codes to work out, as if I’ve worked hard to figure out what I have so far and it’s their job to do the rest the piece of the puzzle I give them. I’d love to see the looks on their faces when they finally work it out, but I’ll never see it, by that point I’d have committed suicide or we’d be dead by then anyway.

For me, I’ll just potter around the world in my own bubble, generating by-thoughts off of pyramids off of brainstorming ideas from sitting in my room facing the stained wall I’ve lived opposite of for the past five years now. I’ll carry on waking up in hot-sweats, fidgeting on my bed in confusion swiftly cracking a smile as I begin to laugh, waking up from the dream of seeing my demise each night since it is the only thing in life I’m not afraid of and can laugh at. Does this make me insane? Or is it me becoming one with what all of our fates hold when the final bell tolls for us?

Hello Evil, Back Again?

Hello evil, back once again are we? Are we ready to dive back into my inner sanctum and seductively poison me with your loving words? Do you think I’m ready to hang on a cliff edge every day to see what beautiful, deviant and menacing ways you can inject into my cranium? Sweet bliss, I think I found my perfect partner and one to marry.

But you left me once before, you ran off without a trace and left me alone, I had no idea of what to do or where to turn. I had a gaping hole inside me that couldn’t be filled, I was left confused and in disarray, why would you do that to someone? I thought we had a good thing going what we had between us! You tore me apart and never took into consideration my feelings, my needs, MY EVERYTHING! You raped my mind and left me motionless for days and weeks!

Days and nights I laid not moving, knotted up in my mind and in a constant state of nostalgia, recollecting moments of our most joyous occasions; I needed to fill those empty moments you gave me when you upped sticks and left! We were a great couple though, weren’t we? My fondest memory of us was me lying awake at night and not sleeping for days, all because you filled my mind every hour, minute and second of the day with the symphony of madness, letting hatred, passion, and yourself, Evil, run through my veins. I’d grin all night and day, chuckle at your jokes of everyone’s deficiencies around me, and smile at your wisdom that had been seeded into my thoughts. Also, you need not to worry, I’ve kept our special implement in the draw, wrapped in a cloth for safe keeping, wouldn’t want it getting blunt now, would we?

We had our falling out periods where I’d shout through confusion at you, your words and ways sometimes never made sense to me and my fit of rage and aggression got the best of me, for this, I’m sorry. I know you’ve always had the best intentions for me Evil, and this time around I’ll take your kind words more into consideration, and I’ll become the protégé you would be proud of, master.

This time around, won’t you stay a little longer? I profoundly missed you before and I don’t think I could part with you again. I waited around for you like a lost puppy, hoping that I would see the day of you coming back around again, but as I’ve said, I hope you stay longer, if not forever.

The pain of becoming normal was unbearable when you left, the fluids in my body slowly turned into something of the natural substance my body should be making, and the acid of normality slowly and painfully burned inside me and disintegrated what you left in me into nothingness, diluted to its thinnest form. From this happening, Evil, my mind was being warped by society and everyone tried to have a say in how I should be and feel, miserably attempting and failing on a grand scale on their efforts, I wasn’t going to give into them.

They came in numbers reaching to the thousands to make me relinquish under their ‘power’, but I remembered something you had told me in the past They are all afraid of you and your potential, you are unique, you are a one of a kind; never give in to the other side. You told me about these people, that they try to change what they don’t understand, and that they won’t stop until you become one of them. What was the punishment to them for this? Pain, wasn’t it? It’ll be my pleasure, Evil.

This time around will be fun, it’ll be just like old times but better, my brain has matured and become more of a sponge. I can’t wait to crack out the sharp friend again and have you offload your methods of torment and hate onto me to use against others. Like a minion and servant to your desire, I kneel before you, I am at your will once again.

My Thoughts Have Voices

You’re nothing. A waste of space. Vermin to the world around you. You’ll never amount to anything. No one cares about you. You’re wretched. You’re right to think you shouldn’t live. You’ve been a loner all your life, everyone that’s ever loved you has disappeared. I’m cemented inside you and you can’t shake me. You’ve been nothing but a failure since you were born. You’re thoughts are sick and you over analyse everything until its dead; like you inside. End your shameful existence with that knife in front of you. Go on, you know it makes sense! Everything sucks for you, and there’s a past that will prove it. Everyone dies someday, why not make yours today? SHUT UP!

I can’t tear my face off quick enough to try and make the voices leave me, it’s like hearing them whisper in each ear and their words bounce off the walls from shouting afar at me, it’s enough to reduce me to what is the nothingness I am told that’s being drilled into me day and night. No music drowns out their taunting and I can’t walk away from it all, I’m being forced to believe that I’m hated and I’m slowly giving into them; no one’s told me otherwise so how do I turn around to these voices and stick up both middle fingers at them?! I always have thought the worst and I’ve never been able to shake it, and these voices suddenly appear like the annoying salesman at your door that won’t leave until you let them in; maybe they are right and I am a failure if I give in to them?

I’m laid sprawled on my bed hypnotised by them, they’ve somehow clicked their fingers and put me into a trance, and I’ve been laying like this for hours now. I can’t recollect what it was they fed me with their so called ‘words of wisdom’ they give me all day every day, but I know time has passed and I haven’t slept in God knows how long. Now I can’t help but think that my mind’s been raped and torn apart leaving grooves and crevasses for them to seed in their malicious words and reap what they sow at a later date. I’m wide awake and my body needs to recuperate, it’s twitching and giving me bolts of electricity from my head to my toes, trying to warn me that my body will shut down if I don’t give it what it needs.

Tossing and turning I can’t take it anymore, I walk to the bathroom, grab both sides of the wall mounted mirror and I bash my face into the heart of it. Blood instantly pours out and shards are left impounded into my skull, but I’m remained calm and I leave myself slumped over with my hands each side of the broken mirror just serenely breathing, watching the succulent velvet red liquid pour out of me to the floor. After a minute or so I shuffle myself to the sink and I watch the sink get painted with my remains, looking up at my shaving mirror to find the debris that’s impaled into me, and attempt to dig out whatever of it I could.

This didn’t help me release the voices, all I could hear is them laughing as if they’ve won the battle and the war is almost over, like they’ve grabbed me and put me inside a stronghold where it’s only a matter of time left for me. All of this was my doing, and I look in the mirror with disgust that I didn’t change how I was at an earlier date.

I spit at the mirror aimed at my face because I’m that sickened at the sight of me. This is what I knew I could have detoured away from if I listened in the first place, if I took in everyone else’s words and exchanged them for what I felt bad about myself, all of this could have been diverted if I let people in and acknowledged the things