The Mouse and I

On the bed my fear is evolved by the idea of certain death. My mind is racing at a million miles an hour through everything I had ever done. I can’t think of enough things to keep up with it, and there’s too much on it to stop. The night before is a blur.

The drugs I took, the drink I drank, the people I met, the sleaze I devoured. Thinking back on all the death that I have craved. Why can’t this be one of those moments? As always when dreams come true I realise they are not what I envisaged them to be. I don’t want to be lying here on this bed thinking about everything I have done, and fearing everything I will never be able to do. My friends come in, to “check on me”, they say. But I know that they’d rather be outside, enjoying the pleasures of life’s party. I ask them to help me, but they just say I’ll be all right, before nervously slipping out. I don’t tell them that I feel better when they’re around, and that I am worse when they are not – I just don’t think it would be right.

In the corner is a mouse. The mouse has made this his house. The mouse crawled up through the drain, but the life this mouse was living is close to completion. He is taking his last gasp of hope, thinking that maybe this house will save him. Will make him feel better, will bring about an end to the misery. The cat ate the dog, so what hope is there for a mouse in the world? Who asks the questions that the mouse has the answers to? Life is never easy, and the mouse was no exception. The mouse was there to add fear into the mind of the dying. The mouse was there to intensify the fear of the room. The mouse is all alone on the floor, in the corner, making a house.

I pray for my heart to stop beating, and yet I am afraid it will. And who do I pray to anyway, if I don’t believe? Every time I move, my weakness collapses me into a heap in another part of the room. They say to wash it through with lots of water. Just one sip is enough to put me into another frenzy. And as it washes through, it needs to come out. Keeping it in is an agony, moving to a place where it can be let out in an acceptable manner, an impossibility. But I try, and stumble down a couple steps, only to be face to whiskers with another dying life.

The mouse was settling in nicely. Not much improvement in his expected life span, but things had not deteriorated. The mouse had just had a visitor. Someone came to visit his house, however the visitor was scared away by the mouse. This did not disappoint the mouse greatly, as he was scared by the visitor himself. Neither of them were strangers to scares, and both of them were familiar with causing a stranger’s fear. Mouse felt damp, but it didn’t matter.

There’s not much left. For hours I have been dreaming about someone knocking on the door, asking if they can come in. But every time I hear footsteps, they end up belonging to lives that walk on past. The pool of sweat below my bed belongs more to my imagination than any reality I’ve been able to grasp. My brain is not entertaining much sense. I tell myself I will think of nothing, and spend the next ten minutes debating on whether the debate on what are “nothing-thoughts” was in fact a thought in itself. On the bright side, I have made a new friend, he understands me, and we share the same misfortune. Neither of us have very much time left, and I think that’s something to bond over.

No one had ever created something for the mouse before. He always had to create whatever he required. Today this had changed, a wall of protection from the dripping had been built by the stranger. The mouse felt special for a while, he no longer had to hold up his arms in protection from the drops of water falling from above. This allowed the mouse to hope, and with that came some rejuvenation. There was a chance that this house could bring to the mouse what he had been in search of, maybe he had chosen the right drain to climb up after all. The mouse considered happiness an option.

The strength is coming back in. My mind had begun to wonder over to my friend. I was trying to make his house more livable. I was no longer thinking about my state, my ailment. My mind no longer lived in the inevitable end, and with that the strength started to come back. The less I thought, the more I lived, the less I cared, the stronger I felt, the better my life became, and yes again, the less I cared, and the more I forget. It is then that I realised that I could go outside and join the world again, but decide that I first better clean up.

The stranger came in again, and the mouse felt his warmth. But soon that warmth turned to cold drops of water, and the fear returned. It was flooding, the water from above was pouring down, no wall of protection could do much to stop this waterfall, the mouse would need a whole roof. Once again the mouse put up his arms to try and protect him from a now sure death. Twitching around, incapable of running away, the mouse eventually gave in to defeat, and flopped down in the corner, as the flood water rose.

I got home later that night, my friend was dead, so I washed him down the drain.