Being betrayed by someone you deeply trust is among the worst things you could experience, it hurts even more the closer you are to the betrayer. So what happens when the one that betrays you shares the same physical space as you?
You spend your entire life believing that your body is yours, always on your side, always your ally, that it will do what you want it to and always work with your best interest in mind. Then when it starts failing you don't know what to do. I couldn't blame my grandmother for her dementia even if it wasn't her brain itself that failed her, after what I've experienced I know being betrayed by my own body would drive me mad too.
Of course this doesn't happen from one day to the next, most of the time. But even if you have days, months or years to get accustomed to the changes it still doesn't feel right. For me it started with these little dots in my vision, tiny smudges on the world that made everything look dirty. I would sit at recess looking out into the distance, just watching them follow my eyes wherever they turned. At first I thought they were just dust particles floating in the light, sometimes I mistook them for some dirt I had to clean out of my glasses but never could. The more I looked at them the bigger they got.
The problem exacerbated when I broke the frame of my newest glasses, I never liked changing them, visits to the doctor only made me more aware of how bad it had gotten. I went from one set of specs to the next, never seeing any change when the doctor asked and just going with the one that made me less uncomfortable even if it wasn't perfect. Perhaps this habit of ignoring the problems is what led to the smudges consuming my vision, in time the bacteria swimming in my eyes was so big it was impossible to see through even with glasses, when I told the doctor what had been happening to me and went through al those tests he told me I was healthy... and suggestede I go see a psychologist. But I wasn't crazy, there really were parasites crawling in my eyeballs, I could feel them move inside them, I could hear them crawl around beneath my closed eyelids every night when I tried to sleep.
Seeing them everywhere and having to ignore them, hearing them at every waking hour, feeling them slowly eat away at my eye from the inside like goddamn termites... It was too much, I couldn' think about anything else, they wouldn't let me. I tried all manner of insecticide, bleach, pepper and cleaning products just to try and kill the bastards but they wouldn't go away, all I did was erase the parts of my vision that weren't yet eaten and made myself blind to anything but them, they were literally all I could see and the noise they made from inside the burnt socket made it impossible to focus on anything else. The last thing I tried was the knife from the kitchen cutlery. The pain was nothing like the relief I felt once it was done. In went the blade and out went my eye. It wasn't that quick and easy, eyes are not as soft as one may think, the entire thing probably went out in mangled chunks, but I couldn't tell. It was a miracle I didn't immediately pass out after the first try, more so because I still had another eye filled with those maggots I needed to get rid of.
No excuses were accepted, and I didn't really fight it at the time. No one ever believed my story and I was tired of repeating it. If anything I was relieved I got rid of what the doctors never fixed. I was exhausted and content with just resting.
So now, I lay locked up in a soft room of white walls, but to me they look black, just like outer space. And just like in space, noone can hear me scream whenever I see a miniature parasite swimming in the distance, at least I hope noone can hear me, those things look small just like the others, but these ones are not inside my eyes, instead they're several light-years away, and every day they look a bit bigger, a bit closer...