I live alone now, have for some time. I can’t hold down a job or venture beyond the doors of my tiny apartment. My sympathetic mother brings groceries by once a week and pays my rent. I am a burden to her.

I no longer hear my mother’s words. The memory of her heartbeat – once the most beautiful sound in the world – is completely lost. It’s been consumed by whimpers and moans and terror-filled screams.

This is my world. No longer are there colors or aromas to enjoy. My sightless existence holds no texture or taste. Screams permeate my senses. The sounds of torture reek with the smell of screams. The flavors of horrified howls saturate my food. What used to be satin bed sheets are now a rough sandpaper of shrieks and bellowing across my skin.

All my senses have merged into a single organ of reception, capable of detecting one thing and one thing only. I eat, breathe, feel – and somehow see – only that which should be heard. Yet, it should not be heard at all, not by any living being.

I hold an answer in my hand right now. I’ve explored every other option available to me, but this is the only one that offers permanence, finality and perhaps an end to my isolation and loneliness.

I draw the razor over my wrist and wait as life fluid pours out, shrieking as it goes. It won’t be long now; time is measured in metered screams – ticking out the seconds in an accursed tempo.

Immobile and weak, I see a deeper blackness than my blindness has ever known. Death approaches and carries me away. It escorts me to a black and burning grave. I feel the scorching heat already.

I realize that my sense of touch has returned, but the knowledge brings me no comfort. The agony of flames has not replaced the screams – it has added to it. Death is not the escape I imagined. I thought nothing could be worse than the untiring screams but I was wrong.

My soul plummets to its doom and flames fill me with pain. I cannot stop screaming. I am the newest member of a macabre choir. My voice joins with others, forming black, mournful music, both haunting and chilling. Screams are our music.

Somehow, I hear a child’s voice off in the distance. His joyful laughter brings no comfort or peace to me. In the blackness, a portal slowly opens, allowing shadows of light to pass through. I see only his silhouette at first, then, at last, recognize his voice. I would gasp were it not for my inability to stop screaming.

He sits among other boys his age, all of them crouching over a triangular object. I know what it is. It’s a familiar sight that sends haunting memories crashing down on me. I hear him speak, through hellishly vociferous shrieks, words I will never forget.

“What will I do in the future?”

The boyish, child-sized shadow is me. The angle of view shifts, allowing a closer inspection of the scene. The black triangle has a hole in the center and sits on a board with the alphabet arcing across its face; the object spells out, one letter at a time, a word that has plagued me all my life.

The portal closes, taking with it the images of my youthful mistake. The yelling and howling then resumes, just as it has for so many years. In a moment of epiphany, I realize that the screaming I’ve heard all my life has been me. Each and every voice, each and every moment, from that first instance until the end of time, has been – and will be – me.

I am the scream.