the monster.

I haven’t been able to sleep for a long while now. 

I’ve grown accustomed to watching the sun dip beneath the horizon in the evening, the daylight melting across the rolling hills. I sit at the window, my skin prickling as the temperature drops every so slightly. I'm used to following the moon float across the dark blanket of sky, glowing silver in the playground of clouds and star. The seconds become hours until it, too, slides out of view under the treetops and the mountains and the old train tracks out in the distance. 

It was the screaming that kept me awake.

Every night. Continuous. Piercingly loud. Pain? Fear? Hunger? How was I to know? All I knew was that the screaming would start as the daylight dwindled and wouldn’t stop for what felt like an eternity. Some nights it sounded like it was miles and miles away, other nights it was right next to me in the same room, resonating through the walls.

It starts quiet. As if it were in my head. Was it really there, or was I hearing things? It would be almost a whimper at first, so small that the clocks in the hallway would drown it out. But the more I ignored it, the more I pushed it from my thoughts, the louder it would become. Wailing, such a terrible wailing - so piercingly loud you can't even hear your own thoughts in your head, so loud that it engulfs you and removes any sense of who you are, like a leech it drains your life and replaces it with its own. The screeching that makes hair stand on end, makes your fingers shake with the desire to quell the noise. What did it want? Does it want me? Is that why I am being tortured, does it want sacrifice? It already taken my life, what more of me is left but the dry, tired husk of what I once was?

I try to block it out. I try to make it stop. Sometimes I even think I hear screaming in the silence, just as I drift off into slumber I snap awake as if a whip had cracked against my spine. Whenever someone took a breath I would expect the screaming to start again. I never slept. I was so tired. I just wanted it to stop, I wanted quiet, I wanted peace.

I never wanted to be a mother.