Enlightenment.

I am washing my hands. Again.

Some of them are beginning to worry, not out loud, not yet, but I can see their eyes flicker to my hands when I enter a room. They don't realize that I notice-that I can see right through their cream caked faces-that I probably see through their eyes more clearly than they ever did. It would make me laugh if I could remember what that meant.

It's amazing the things you forget when the world changes.

Like colours. I think that there used to be more colours. Some were brighter. Some made statements or soothed the people. I think that's how it worked anyway. Trust people to depend on something that doesn't exist to tell them about the world. I don't need them anymore. The colours the smells. The people. I don't need them to tell me about the world.

I already know. 

I think that maybe I always knew. Like one day I woke up (it was such a loud awaking. sounds like metal breaking and the flash of heat all against me) and understood that everything will peel away. I took my hands and pulled. I pulled at the sky and the ground and anything i could reach. I could reach everything. And the world fell to pieces for me. Big coloured chunks that fell like ceiling insulation across the floor and i kicked them aside and kept going. I got to the great grey bones of the earth and knew that this was the end. 

All my life I thought the dark was in my head and the light was outside. Now I know better.

I pulled the whole world to pieces in one day. No one noticed. They kept walking on streets that I had just thrust aside like old building blocks. They spoke about the rolling sky and the chance of flooding when I had peeled the sky back and left the metal framework it was plastered to standing bare. I would have cared except that I knew. 

I can pull the people to pieces too.

They just sort of fall. They lay across the floor casually, clumsily. And then they break apart piece by piece and then there is something small and skittering in the pile of well maintained wax. It is afraid of me. It moves sideways amidst the camouflage it has used for years hoping to avoid my attention. I don't care enough to look anymore.

All this tearing has done something to my hands.

I cannot keep them clean. I used to keep my nails long. they were smooth and well polished and generally genteel. I cannot anymore. The dirt gets under, stays under, won't leave. That's why I wash them. again and again. Its amazing. The filth in this world. Its everywhere under and in everything. I scrub with the filthy soap trying to strip it from my skin. Again and again. 

The cracks are appearing. They are red and swollen but I cannot stop.

My skin peels away in long sticky strips. It litters the floor in piles that coil around each other. I cannot stop pulling, tugging, tearing. I destroyed the whole world in a day. I am the only real thing left. So I continue to scrub. 

She entered the bathroom carelessly. Then she screamed. and screamed.

I skittered across the floor panicked. I ran for cover. I tried to disappear. 

The pressure and the screams melded and melted. The last scrap of sound came from far far away.

"I hate cockroaches."