Bottles

Cold air rides a slow breeze in through a half dozen broken windows, taking the last bits of warmth from this unheated house. I gaze down into the dark shiny pools that cover the floor, my face a smear on the pieces of moonlit glass.

The thick layer of dust and filth wipes away under my boots as I take a few slow steps across the large room I have found myself in, my breath catching as I find myself in front of the mantle I thought I had remembered so clearly. Dark wood polished so perfectly it had a warmth of its own set into clean white rock with a rough reassuring touch under your hand. What lay in front of me now was nothing more than a vandalized monument to a better time, the once beautiful wood cracked and scuffed, the rock dirty and stained.

I follow with my eyes the dark stain that runs down the front, like a dried waterfall that many years ago poured its filth down a cliff. I turn my eyes before I reach the bottom, I know what lies there, made of glass but not that of one of the windows. The shatter still wrings through my ears, the neck coming away as the remainder of the bottle fell to the floor.

When I turn my back, they are everywhere, dozens of them in sloppy piles, pushed into corners or pilled on shelves and tables, garbage bags stuffed full. Their weight bears down now, their true weight, not the headaches and nights spent on the bathroom floor, nor the false sleep that never brought a proper rest, not even the heartache, that I could drown just as easily as anything else. Not my pain, the pain I brought into this life that stretched its boney cold hands out and pulled everyone around me close.

It tore the light from their eyes and the love from their souls, to ruin so many good people because they refuse to let go of a monster is such an atrocity.

I can feel a new cold now, an unnatural one like knives reaching down to my bones. My vision swims and I stumble back hard into the mantle, the sounds of wood splintering and cracking before falling to the ground echo loudly before I bounce away and my legs betray me to a pile of bottles where a kitchen table once stood.

The cry of agony I release rips through the air and brings tears to my eyes, I scream until my throat hurts and I become nothing more than a weeping monster in a shallow grave of his own making. It sounds then, from the impossible dark corners of the frozen room, it is no god, there is no god here. It pulls on me now, pulls on my spirit, my body not moving but I feel as if I’m falling, down an elevator shaft, deep into the earth.

My new residence will not be one of golden fields and warmth, fluffy clouds turned up to be washed by a warm friendly sun. The ones I loved will not be there to greet me and embrace me. It will be dark and cold, full of the pain and regret of a wasted lifetime. A life that brought nothing to the world, one that made it no better but worse. The frozen land I will find myself in soon, the one that will rip the skin off the bottoms of my feet and bite the ends off my fingers a nose, that is where I will call home for the rest of eternity.