Depression
He withdrew a cheap lighter, and had to flick it several times before its orange set his parents aflame.
The scream breached the silence, echoing off the black cliff face and into the night where the moon battled (and failed) to look through the clouds.
A slippery path, so thin that it enabled only one person to pass at a time, lay weathered into the sandstone. Barely 10 metres below, swells culminated and collapsed into frothy waves which lashed the finger-like crags that rose out of the water to claw at the sky.
It was on this path, with his back to the sea, that the boy stood. He was young, no more than 8 years of age, yet the gravity in his eyes said older. Their mood was matched by his face; pale except for the black that rimmed the eyelids, the skin taut on the angular frame but the forehead creased.
He shifted slightly, as moonlight briefly sludged through to expose the photo of his parents in his left hand. They weren't smiling. They never smiled. All they did was hurt. If he had known the word dignity, and understood innocence, he would have realized he’d been stripped of both.
The photo was the epitome of the negative emotions that were dammed inside of him; boiling anger, frustration, hurt and, above all, an overwhelming despair that gnawed at his heart and threatened to steal his sanity.
From his shirt pocket, he withdrew a cheap lighter, and had to flick it several times before its orange set his parents aflame. Blood metalled in his mouth as he bit his lip, resisting the outcry that crouched and swelled in his throat as reality burnt his hand. When he could withstand the pain no longer, he dropped the lighter into the hungry sea below, and clenched his fist and-
SCREAMED.
Pain, but also by a powerful weariness that had caused him to cry out before, a magnet that erased hopes and dreams as it encouraged escape. The illness inside of him did not lie in ashes like those in his hand.
He flew into the night, only a phoenix within.
Dec' 1991 (19 years old)
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