Clawing Stroke

"What he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke"

You know, there are these ... strange ... days. These days were everything is slowed down and you seem to understand something a little bit more with every deep breath you take? You watch the world around you as if you're not really there, as if you are a mere bystander watching the chaotic lives of all the people around you and there is nothing really you could do to interfere.
But you don't really care - at all. It is just strange and everything seems to happen in slow motion and at the same time with an incredible speed. While you just stand there, transfixed to the ground and watch silently as you begin to understand. As the weight of the importance of just one tiny little moment begins to dawn on you. As you begin to see how everything is linked and one little action influences the lives of not only one or two persons but so many people and nearly nobody really realizes this.

If you change one thing, everything will be different. Everything will change. For the better? For the worse? For everyone?

Maybe it was meant to be. Even if it destroyed one person, affected them badly ... maybe a whole lot more profited from it? Maybe it is the best because the majority only gained from it, while just one or two unfortunate people were affected badly?
But who are we to judge who’s life is more important? Who deserves to have luck?

Quantity over quality?

Is there justice in luck? Has everybody good luck some days? Is it divided evenly?

I believed: yes. But it was just theory, mostly.

'Cause then there is a moment you meet one of these unfortunate people who only seem to have bad luck throughout their lives. Who never where the ones who gained something out of a situation, not once in there lifes.

I've met him. Often. Always thought with a bit of pity about him. He experienced so many downsides of the thing we call life. But he hasn't capitulated, ever. Not after his wife left him. Not after he lost his job. Not after he wasn't allowed to take care of his son anymore, cause he seemingly couldn't pay enough to assure his well being, therefore he couldn't see him anymore. He grieved his loss and then moved on and tried to do his best to change the situation for the better. Not even after he got really ill. Not after he nearly died. Not after he seemed to understand that he hadn't had any true friend.

He experienced so many tough things. More than the majority of the people do. But he fought always.

But for some reason he wasn't aloud to have a somewhat normal life.

I met him a few times in the hallway. I overheard some of the conversations he had and some of the conversations about him. Even here, he was looked at strangely. They called him freak and murderer.
I never really talked to him. Until this day, this really strange day, came.

It was cloudy outside and I had this peculiar feeling inside my gut. I couldn't place my anxiousness, but somehow I knew something big was about to happen. Something grave was gonna change.

I always had a good intuition, call it sixth sense or whatever. I always trusted my gut feeling and it never failed me. But this day it wasn't something I could quite name. It wasn't something I could run away from. So I had no choice but to let me get surprised with whatever life had in store for me.

I couldn't really believe it at first. Couldn't properly understand the words that left his mouth in a deceived manner. They were so out of this world that I just couldn't grab it. But somehow, even if his words were so unbelievable weird, I knew that what he spoke wasn't anything less but the truth.

He was convicted of murdering his family. He was put in the forensic psychiatry because they claimed that he heard voices which told him to do it. Schizophrenic, that was the diagnosis. And no hope at all to leave this place ever again and roam the earth as a free man.

Now I know, he really heard voices, he really was slightly insane. But who wouldn't if he'd seen, what he saw. I can't even imagine what he must have felt, what he must've thought.

He told the grand jury that he was guilty. Because he had a guilty conscious, but he was as innocent as I was.

He never even laid as much as a finger on his family. He would've never hurt them, ever.

One day he finally received the much anticipated call from his ex-wife. She was desperate, he could hear it in her strained voice. He had asked her countless times what was wrong, but she never said anything. Not sure if she didn't want to or if she couldn't, he remained on the phone trying to calm his loved one who was now in hysterics. After a lot of his calming words she managed to utter the words he imagined her say so many times before. “Come back here. Come here to me, and to him. Come back, please.”
High on this words he drove there as fast as he could. Torn between the anticipation of seeing them again after such a long time and the fear of what might have caused her to phone him. But as the optimistic man he always has been, he didn't waste much thought on the negative, rather focusing on the memory he had of his son's face, his happy smile and his with joy and mischief sparkling eyes. With a smile on his face he arrived at his old house. He knocked on the dark brown wooden door, but it opened on it's own account and tentatively he stepped inside. He called out for his wife and his son and was met with an ear piercing scream.

He rushed forward into the kitchen and slipped on the wet ground. He looked down and slowly it registered in his head that he was now sitting in a warm puddle of red liquid. Blood. His son's blood he realized as he looked towards his family. His once so happy little son had a tear-streamed face, his mouth open in silent cries and blood pouring out of a rather deep wound on his stomach.

His former wife stood there watching with glee as his face slowly grew paler and cackled. The knife she had in her hand landed with a thud on the ground. Menacingly she came closer to him and watched as his face contorted into disbelief.

“It's your fault!”, the words echoed in the rather silent kitchen. She said it again and again. Until he found his voice again and stuttered the question “Why would you do this? Why?”
“You weren't here, my dear. You know nothing about what it is like to be abandoned by the only person you loved and left alone to care for an insolent crybaby. You don't know nothing 'bout how hard it is to be a mother and the only other person responsible left you behind in the dust!”, she screeched.
“But you left me! You left me, you stole him from me.” He crawled over to his son and cradled him in his strong arms, trying to comfort the terrified child, whispering comforting words in his ear and applying pressure to his wound which slowed down the bleeding a least a bit. His son whimpered and tried to hide in his fathers arms.

The woman, clearly possessed by an inhumanly rage sprang forward and clawed at her sons eyes with her bare hands. Her fingernails leaving trails of blood on his fragile face. She kept screaming that this was his fault. Because he left them, because he wasn't there, because he didn't came fast enough so she had to succumb to the voices.

He tried to overpower her and calm her but she had the strength of an insane and desperate person. Her fingernails teared through his skin and then she took the knife.

Suddenly it was very quiet. As if the world stopped breathing for a moment. Anticipating what was going to happen next.

In her mad moment she took the knife and stabbed him, then stabbed their son through his little heart and looked with an insane grin at her once so beautiful face at him. She took his hand, abusing his paralyzed moment after watching his only son die at the hands of his own mother, and put it around her neck, with so much force it started bruising. The moment he snapped out of his daze, she was already at the other side of the room, and he had the knife in his hand.

She looked satisfied and with her razor-blade sharp nails cut open her wrist, adding to the already immense blood lost she had suffered from the stabbing wound in her stomach. He watched her die, with nothing he could do and he heard the sirens coming nearer and nearer. The blue light reflecting eerily at the white walls of the room he once used as his safe haven.

…

He looked me dead in the eyes, seemingly unaffected, as if he hadn't just told me the most horrible experience he ever suffered, but a mere children tale.

“You know”, he said, “some sounds you never forget. It is an unmistakeable sound when fingernails scrap over skin with so much force to tear it open. The sound the drops of blood make when they fall onto the tiles of the kitchen floor. Or the sound of the last breath a human takes.
And there are moments you'll never be able to forget.
The one movement of her hand visits me every night in my dreams”.

And in this moment I understood. I understood that what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke.