Toys in the basement.

The existence of light in my life has only come from being pushed into the darkest corners of the basement. The cold, wet floor, the imaginary rats nibbling at my bare ankles, the annoyance of a leaky pipe overhead, dripping ice cold rusty water into the deepest lobe of my ear. The flies buzzing around my eyelids that were once maggots, mutated from a dead rats mouth that had been caught by a mousetrap in the early summer heat.
The sounds of a normal every day life come from the beams above my head, I can hear them going about their lives, they scare me... cooking, cleaning, talking on the phone, listening to music, enjoying stuff. I can't relate, I have no idea how they do it, and I am miles away from any sort of comprehension of it. The abscesses on my hands have become so painfully swollen, it's almost impossible to swat away the flying maggots from my face, so I let them land on my eyelids and scratch their legs together. It was annoying at first, but I have adjusted myself to deal with the lowest form of uncomfortability, so I close my eyes and eventually they fly off for a few minutes to circle the room in search of a more rotten substance than my face. A chip in the tin foil on the one window above the broken washing machine let's me know that it is daytime. I know it is a warm summer day, but I also know that no matter how hot it is outside, I will still be freezing. So I stay paralyzed in my little nook, it is where I am the most comfortable. My feet had fallen asleep an hour prior to the flying maggot circus, now I just can't feel them at all. I have to pee, but I can't move, so it just streams into my lap forming a puddle in my lap. It's warm for a few minutes, and it feels really nice, but it eventually turns into a cold shitty feeling that matches the rest of my body. I can smell death in the room, but I can't tell if it's me or the decomposed rat in the other corner. I see a shadow walk past the rip in the tin foil, my heart starts to race. I magically get feeling back in my legs as I hear a knock at the top of the stairs. I rise up like nothing was ever wrong with me and pull myself up the wooden steps by the splintered railing. I open the door to a man with a shaved head and a mouth full of balloons, he is my best friend. He doesn't say a word, he just spits two balloons into his hand, and places the cold slimy balls of hope and joy into my open, sweaty palm.
I slam the door in his face and rush back down the stairs almost killing myself. I tie the dirty, bloody shoelace around the top of my bicep, load the gun, and pull the trigger. The abscesses in my hands make it nearly impossible, but I fumble it all together just enough to hit the vein. The flying maggots instantly turn into butterflies, as the film of cold dirty sweat that had been layering my face all morning magically disappears. I stand tall and stretch, almost touching the beams on the ceiling. The normal strangers above me don't seem so scary anymore, and I could probably have a conversation about anything they would like to talk about if I was to go up and join them...