I felt suffocated. Bound inside this body, I felt nothing but a stranger as I struggled to sustain my sanity. The pounding ache in my head didn't help either as I blinked slowly, trying to understand and comprehend the words that Ivan just said.  What did he say again? I heard something, I saw his lips move, but the piercing static in my ears didn't let those words swim through. Everything was wrong. Everything was so wrong, and I wanted nothing more than this to end. I wanted this to be over with yet no matter how much I clawed from the inside of this body, this reality, I couldn't.  Suppressing the urge to puke my guts out, I gulped deeply. His eyes noticing my every move not bothering me at all as it would have.   "What did you say?" Tricked by my spiralling head, I could hardly catch what he said. A poor attempt from my brain, trying to hide the truth, protecting me from what really is by distorting and distracting the present.

Things were eerily quiet. The record playing P. Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers did nothing to calm my nerves as I was made to sit in the same office for the second time that day after dinner. It wasn't Ivan this time but the devil himself who had his eyes closed and back rested on the majestic chair on the other side of the desk. His fingertips on both hands touching each other in a poise of calibrate relaxation.  I watched on edge as his chest barely rose up and down, making the slightest movement, assuring me that he wasn't a statue nor a figment of my imagination.  He was very much here, in this room, with no one but me. I have never been able to understand his actions before or predict them successfully but this time I didn't need much to assess why this present situation has come by. From the moment he found me with Ivan in this room with the closed door,  he hasn't said much except for the general direction of how things should happen wh

I have always wondered if it's better to be sad for a reason or to be sad without any reason. When I lived with Liza, I was happy. Peaceful. Content. She made me feel normal and laugh at things which were not funny at all. Yet somehow I would find myself being sad sometimes. I couldn't find a particular reason why but the heaviness that used to  possess my body made it difficult to do even the basic necessities of life. Some days they were easier to handle and some days they suffocated enough to make me knock myself out with sleeping pills just because the reality was too undesirable. I just didn't want to live. Now that I have a reason, I know that things can be always worse this way as well. Not being able to literally move or have those basic necessities snatched away without any consent. The comparison between both seemed hard still. Because like the former... I just don't want to live. Ivan sat on the toilet seat with his leg crossed

I opened my eyes and blinked a couple of times to find myself in my room but with the lights off which never happened before. For some reason, they were always kept on making me think that they cannot be turned off at all.  The night glowed outside and shined in through the glass windows and inside the room, making things barely but enough visible for me to walk towards the door. My hand felt cold against the warm doorknob as I frowned and realized that I didn't know they had a centralized heating system either. Why were things suddenly changing? I turned around with my hand still secured around the knob, eyes searching and confirming that I was indeed alone in the room otherwise I wouldn't have made so far across from the bed without being interrupted.  The wooden floor whispered in squeaks underneath my feet as I made my way towards the staircase. It was hard to forget what I saw. I knew now that Dimitri's odd behaviour was triggered only because

The world around dimmed down and then completely ceased to exist as I took a step deeper into the dark and unknown abyss of something very unfamiliar and dangerous. Somehow this territory felt more threatening than that of the one upstairs. A certain heavy air, a tension that set all the red flags off in my head. Probably because Dimitri was here. I was met with a wall after the last step on the descending stairs, two hallways yet again. One to the left and the other to the right. An indecisive choice, one undetectably more safe than the other. The light from upstairs appeared to come at an end as well, the hallways looming in the darkness like I was stepping into hell itself. There was no way I could have made a safe decision without being a psychic which unfortunately and most definitely I wasn't.  Time wasn't a friend either.  With the cards all turned against me, I took the right one like I did the first time. If something bad was going to happe