On a Monday With Rain

It was Monday. He is lying in the middle of the cramped one-room apartment on a carpet stained with cigarette burns, reeking of tequila. Looking around, there would be the suspicion that the walls were cursed with a perpetual state of beige and bland. There is a cacophony of chaos permeating in the air, formed from the rain violently plinking against his only window. Underneath the rain's unavoidable presence, there is a subtle tick of a clock. Not that he owns an analog clock or any clock for that matter, but he can hear the gutting sound of time passing slowly with every repositioning shadow on the wall. It was a cutting reminder of his growing incompetence in a world of fast-paced thinkers. A flash of memory imprinted his recent reality of unemployment, which caused a panging panic to pour over his face. There was no vacancy for the stranger of emotion in his mind, which consequently caused him to shove any fear under a rug and return to mindlessly counting the bumps on his popcorn ceiling. It was two weeks since his boss let him go, and Jamie had violently raced through the 5 stages of grief, to a 6th stage; apathy. Since Jamie had allowed his job to disembowel him of energy and effort, he was left cold and empty with its leaving, with a shivering passion for what once was. Jamie’s trance of numbness had fallen to a state of hazy sleep. 

He woke up on his bare, yellow mattress, having no memory of moving from his imprint on the dank carpet. The vent above him began to softly hiss, mimicking unbridled pressure from a broken pipe. The sky was still hailing a storm from above onto the street below, pelleting the building and causing a disturbing reverb throughout the room. Jamie heard a pluck of a bass, or maybe, a beat of a drum. The rhythmic boom increased in speed, to the point of masking any reality of rain, deafening Jamie. His eyes shot open, as the pupils enlarged to the size of marbles, causing the forefront of his brain to ache from the sudden unrestricted growth. An ache that crawled from its original position to spread across his head, placing his brain in a painful vice. He felt a presence. The presence of danger, coming to lure him from his internal death and deliver him to the ultimate end of suffering. Yet, this wasn’t a release, but sentencing of torture for the life of idleness he leads. He was choked by fear, silenced from any screams to endure the impending conclusion. His heart reached its final climax, to unclench its grip, and give him breath. The presence left, and with it, the strike of the beat. Jamie’s muscles relaxed free from the hostage, but soon after, he spasmed unconsciously shaking away the brutish adrenaline that forced entry into his veins.

Jamie grew up an only child in an upper-middle-class household. He was a successful student and track star used to the natural skill he had both mentally and physically. Coming out of high school, Jamie felt the overbearing weight of his parents' success, while simultaneously feeling the lack of his own. He was admitted to UVA but was expelled his sophomore year for alcohol abuse, fueled by his crippling fear of inadequacy. Jamie never found himself farther than his father's job, as an entry-level stockbroker. A father, whose scorn curled his lips in blood-curdling fear and chained him with anxiety, a psychosomatic response from the grooming of his childhood through open verbal disappointment. Jamie found himself a natural at anything his hands and mind set out to do, but what most hadn't realized was that this ability to be a master of all trades, came from the constant pressure of a Father whose pride forced performance. Performance and pride were two things that one must live for, or at least, ones that Jamie was taught to live for. As college allowed a venting of a pressured mind, he found a sweet release in the toxin of alcohol that allowed him to escape a world of heartache. He begins to drown in freedom and loosen his grip on performance, sinking him in a sand hole of illusion.  

As Jamie finds himself an animal in the cage of existence, his mind has numbed him past sensibility. He finds the ledge of a building, a trigger of a gun, or the overdose of medication, a simple laugh, and not any thrill of danger. For the fear of failure, the weed that has wrapped his heart, has made the place of a monster in his head. As the drum is silenced and his muscles tense in relaxation, he sees his father standing over him. Jamie jumps from his mattress to the back wall, smacking his brain against the cursed beige wall behind him. He could see the silhouettes and hue of his father's checkered sweater, over his blue button-up. A uniform he wore quite often from his birth to adulthood. A view that causes his heart to spike in panic. His father reaches to grab him, but the ghost's hand passes through his t-shirt collar and dissipates with the noise of the rain. 

His father reaches to grab him, but the ghost's hand passes through his t-shirt collar and dissipates with the noise of the rain. The cloud of terror escapes into the molecules surrounding him.

He suddenly realized. He was a man of fear; fearing the hammer of disappointment. He feared the hailing hell of scorn and the constant spewing of his evident inadequacy. As Jamie sat up in his one-room apartment and heard the storm outside his window, he felt a peace bubble within him, for he was no longer haunted by the spirit of fear, but by the realization that his mind made an enemy far larger than the one he was faced with. He wasn't fighting his Father or his future failure. He was fighting his mind's perception of success, and he was fighting the overwhelming desire to fall to depression. He wasn't a man of fear, but a slave to man's false views. Whoever lies below on that rainy street on Monday night, understood the tranquility and love from the skies tears, and just above them, so did Jamie.