Information

Flared
Legacy Name: Flared

The Common Experiment #911
Owner: Yorick

Age: 9 years, 6 months, 3 weeks

Born: August 22nd, 2016

Adopted: 8 years, 2 months, 1 week ago

Adopted: January 4th, 2018

Nominate Pet for Spotlight

Statistics

• Level: 40
   
• Strength: 76
   
• Defense: 10
   
• Speed: 10
   
• Health: 10
   
• HP: 10/10
   
• Intelligence: 97
   
• Books Read: 92
• Food Eaten: 0
• Job: Rehabilitator

They call it a flare, times like these.
I couldn’t care less what they call it.

I stagger in to the doctors office spine propped up by tylenol, tears behind the friendly smile and pretending to care about whatever the doctor is saying about general health. Good, lovely, sounds like a solid plan.… Whatever you just said. I don’t care about that, or long term really. I try to. Some days I succeed.
Mostly I laugh to cover the scream in my throat and barely resist asking …

“Can you hear it?” That sobbing as we chat.
“Can’t you feel the heat?” That fire that flares hotter each time… and never dies down.

An inferno of hell just for me. Is this punishment? Is this what I deserve?
I feel them you know. Those words you throw around.
“What kind of pain?”
"Throbbing burning stabbing dull??”

I feel the burn of the pain.
The fire.

I feel those meek sounding words carved in my bones with arcane symbols. Trails of blackened flesh and grooves of fractured calcium laid bare. I hear the crackle of those flames as the world’s worst soundtrack. That audio doesn't mesh well with birdsong or the laughter in the distance of the neighborhood. Go figure. Neither do I but I sure try. It’s hard though when the universe holds my limbs to a burner. Multitasking that is …. interesting and yields mixed results.

“On a scale of 0-10, zero being none and 10 being the worst you can imagine where would you rate your pain right now?”

I’d answer. It tended to be 7-8.
If I can make myself walk in it’s a seven even if by the time I get to my destination it’s an 8.
If I can talk it’s 8 maximum. Talking in logical lines at those times would be asking too much. Or remembering to track the conversation well. All I can think about is the nearest horizontal surface, the number of ice packs because my pain’s wired backwards, or the amount of time left until I can leave.
If I can move and think in sentences it’s 8.5.
Nine and ten I won’t discuss too deeply.

Nine is the last one I fully remember. It’s not a pleasant memory but ten… I don’t even remember too clear. And I’m glad. I don’t need to imagine the worst pain. I know I make sounds of distress and either writhe or stay so still it’s eerie. More than that? The fractured memories I do have I can come flashing back triggered by a scent, a texture or a sound. An attack of memory so sharp and clear of softening influences that all that is left is the truth. So no I don’t need to imagine.. I remember the pain I deflect conversation around and deny the deep wounds it leaves on my soul. The sheer weight of the wear and tear to my mind every day of coping with the impossible. Not living but surviving.
Every. Single. Day …with no end in sight.
I don’t want to remember that. Who would?
Flared they call it.
The carving starts again the deep nerve pain. So different from surface heat of swelling or muscle aches and pains.

“Doctor it hurts when___-“
“Then don’t do that”! The old joke goes. It’s a classic.


I laugh as my world burns from the inside and no one notices the smoke.
You didn’t let me finish. The laughter flares into hysteria….The howling beckoning of descent into madness. Caught short only by my love, my reverence for life and hard won wisdom. I cling to that edge with every fiber of my being.
“It hurts when I breathe.”

Ashes ashes

we all

Fall


...down

From the Ashes

The descent is always rough.
The pull downwards, the shriek of air as I plummet. The crash is a resonating boom hearing it more than seeing the ashy plume of dirt left in my wake. Moving after that…. Shaking strength back into aching muscles, gritting teeth biting a lip bloody, straightening a spine bowed with the weight of Atlas.

Each joint screams in a symphony of pain and my heart rattles in my chest. The slow heavy thump against my ribcage the drums of beginning.

Thump
Thump thump

I love them. My reasons to live and fight.
I cherish it. Life so vibrant around me.
I know it. I know it’s not always this and there’s more to living than this.

My heart’s beat picks up.
Eyes tightly shut against the pain paints sunspots inside my mind. The pain of the fire is always there but so is sunlight no matter how shut off I am. No matter how dark the world around me is. That warm light beckons me forward with dancing pixies behind my eyelids.
I open my eyes and fix my gaze. Not down at the ashy fields of loss, but up to the sky.
Always up.

I only hesitate a moment.

The memories of descent, of burning to ashes, it haunts me. Humbles me and can make me feel small. But I don’t need confidence or hope though to know what to do next.
I get up anyway.

I launch upwards again. And again.

In the sky I am a firework bursting into flames of my own agony and I scream my defiance. Of pain, of loss, of anything keeping me from flying.
Curls of heat and the strike of a lit match. Bonfire bursting into light. Sparks flickering in my veins.
I rise.

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