mckatalyst

[mckatalyst]

Blind Rage

The violent sound of glass shattering filled my ears and bellowed through my head as I shot up in my bed at 3 am. This was it. The time had finally come. Three years had passed since I had told him I didn’t want to see him ever again, but I always knew that he’d be back again. It was only a matter of time. I fled to the door and fumbled with the doorknob as he tripped over the window air conditioning unit, but it was too late. He gripped my fragile arm with the force of a steel vice. I turned to see those all-too-familiar slate blue eyes staring into mine. His malevolent, searing glare made my blood run cold, and I swear that for a moment, time stopped. As I stood there paralyzed, he threw his head back and let out a growling laughter. As he jerked my body toward him, the gleam of the knife I kept on my nightstand caught my eye, and a brief rush of hope came over me.

     As he threw me onto the bed and began to rip my clothes apart, I didn’t put up much of a fight. If I was going to have a prayer in hell at getting out of this alive, I was going to have to execute this perfectly. I stared at the ceiling, rapidly playing out my plan of action in my head as a type of rehearsal when suddenly, I remembered that my mother was home. As he crawled all over my body like a scattering intrusion of roaches, he leaned into the crook of my neck, drunk with power and rage and snarled. “Do you know what I want to do to you? I want to slip one hand inside of you and ask you if you like that, like the whore that you are, and I want to wrap the other around your throat and watch the life slowly leave your eyes”. His restraint tightened while he spoke, and I desperately reached for the knife. As I struggled to gain a secure grip on the handle, I took a deep breath, ready to plunge the blade into his back, the way he’d taught me to do so long ago. Then I saw black. I was stunned. What the fuck had just happened to me? Had I died? Was I just having another nightmare?

     For an instant, I calmed down as I was distracted by the sudden onset of this bizarre infliction, but I quickly realized that I could still hear him panting in my ear, and I could still feel his sweat on my skin. It was then that I understood that I had gone blind. I tried desperately in a fit of panic to stab at any part of him that I could, but he overpowered me with even more rage, in spite of my best attempts to regain control. We rolled off the edge of the bed and landed hard the carpet. I frantically tried to wriggle my way to freedom, covering my knees and elbows with rug burns in the process.

     It wasn’t always this way. We were happy once, and I had loved him. At least, I loved him as much as anyone could love with the shards of a broken heart. To say he walked into my life at a bad time wouldn’t be fair, because in truth, he never did anything slowly or easily… not walking, talking, loving, and most of all, not fucking. He was by all accounts, a hurricane-type force to be reckoned with. He was a beautiful and charming disaster on two feet with all the steadiness and intensity of a freight train. Standing at 5’ 8”, he was a nearly flawless raven-haired, lightly tanned, blue-eyed specimen of man. We were never supposed to happen. A friend of my older brother's, I  never gave him a second thought when he asked me to meet him for dinner. I was charmed, and I turned a deaf ear when he told me that night how easy it would be for him to kidnap, rape, and kill little girls. Truth be told, I didn't take him seriously, and I never thought I’d see or hear from him again after the night we met. But he had other ideas, and he was never easily deterred.

He charged into my life so relentlessly that I never stood a chance, and I have never fully recovered. Like a match, we burned hot and fast, snuffing out just as quickly as we began. No matter how much time had passed, I still found myself frequently wondering where it all changed. One day, you think you’re in love. You’re making out like teenagers, there are spontaneous slow dances in the woods in the bed of a truck, and moonlit sing-alongs on long and aimless drives. Then one day you wake up and the landscape has changed. You’re lying and screaming, threatening to kill each other, hate-fucking, and leaping out of moving cars to run for your life. And then it happens… you get tired. You grow tired of fighting with them, of talking to them, of thinking about them. And you move on. At least, that’s what I did. It’s what I always did. But he wasn’t built for that kind of abandonment. He needed to own something… someone. He needed to feel drunk with power just to survive, and he NEVER lost a fight.

I gasped as I felt the edge of the blade in my hand slide across flesh. I struggled to process what had happened, using my senses of touch and hearing to scarcely construct an image of the scene. Then I saw it. My vision came flooding back in an instant, and with it, came a crippling headache. Furious, he ripped the knife from my hand and charged me, but somehow I managed to muster the strength to fight back. We grappled, all the while sustaining cut after cut as we battled for the knife. I dealt a blow to his windpipe, and again, everything went black. I wondered what was happening to me. Had I had some sort of stroke? Was I truly going blind? Would my vision come back like it had before? I flailed gracelessly and prayed that I could somehow steer clear of that 8 inch piece of steel. A sharp pain in my Achilles tendon propelled me toward the door, as the colors bombarded my eyes like sparks, quickly evolving from blurry orbs into a clear picture. I turned and jammed my thumb into his eye. If I had to fight partially blind, then at least I’d stand a better chance on an even playing field, or battlefield, as it were.

I tried to run, but I had sustained multiple deep lacerations to my legs and my heel. I threw my weight left and right into the walls of the hallway that led into my kitchen, where I collapsed. I looked back, and saw him still standing in my room with shards of glass in his knee and long, shallow cuts riddling his entire body. He screamed and stomped like a child throwing a tantrum as he held his hands over his eye. I army-crawled through the kitchen as fast as I could, barely able to breathe. I was exhausted, but I knew he would be making his way to my mother’s room on the other side of the house. I called out to her from the kitchen and told her to lock the door and stay in her room. Confused and adrenalized, she denied my pleading, and ran to help me. I demanded that she leave me, proclaiming that this was my fight and I needed her to be safe. She was the only pillar in my world. She was God to me. In the chaos, we didn’t notice him until he was inches away, spilling his blood on the cheap vinyl flooring. I shoved my mother into the dining room, and threw myself into him, wrestling with him down the hallway and back toward my room. I fell across the threshold of my bedroom when I felt him jam his finger into the gaping wound on the back of my ankle. I echoed in anguish, and I saw black.

It’s amazing how quickly you adapt to losing a sense. Your survival instinct kicks in and your other remaining senses are heightened. I listened intently for the whooshing of the air around me as he moved around me, punching and biting me in his exhaustive attempts to prevent me from reaching where the knife had fallen under the bed. He dragged me backward by my ankle and finally regained leverage over me. He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt the beating of his heart against the skin of my back. He wrapped his hand around my throat and grunted mockingly in my ear, “Now she’s going to die, and you can live the rest of your life in agony, knowing that you couldn’t save her”. My heart dropped into my stomach, and I felt a new kind of fury seething from me. Charged with adrenaline and the urge to protect my mother, I slammed into his face with the back of my head. His teeth punctured my scalp like a staple gun, but it didn’t hurt. I was anesthetized by my own rage.

As he released his grip on me, he fell backwards, and I quickly dropped to all fours and grabbed the knife. I knew this was the end. I had him. I was going to win, to survive. I sprung up, swinging my left hand around the weak body in front of me, and sliding my right hand up, pressing knife to throat. I let out a righteous and resounding roar as I sliced into the flesh in my hands. I exhaled heavily, and as I drew in my next breath, my sight came barreling back just in time for me to see him in front of me, leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest, baring a sneering grin. As I stared into those soulless greyish eyes, my arms went limp and a body collapsed at my feet. There, spouting blood all over the walls, lay my lifeless mother, who refused to leave me, and like always, gave everything she had to protect me. Horrified, I felt the air in my chest be sucked from lungs. With that, I felt him slowly pull the knife from my hand, and plunge it under my ear.  He sliced slowly, calmly, gracefully across, gliding through my throat as easily as butter. I looked one final time into those eyes like the raging seas, I dropped to my knees, and saw black for the last time.

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Iggy

“Yeah, all right. I’ve got it. It’ll be done tonight. No- yeah, yeah, I’ve got it. All right. I’ll call you when it’s done.” Ignacio, better known as Iggy, hung up the phone and headed downtown to the corner of Oak Street and Main Street to grab a pint before work.  He scratched at his well-groomed and coarse black beard and spat on the sidewalk, narrowly missing the Prada shoes on the woman passing by. She gasped and opened her mouth to accost him, but before she could, he growled a baritone, “Fuck you,” the toothpick from last night’s triple deluxe bacon burger still dangling from his bottom lip. The woman shuffled away, shocked and appalled at the rage in his eyes and the hatred in his voice. She knew intuitively that he was not the kind of man you want a confrontation with… the kind of man who is not afraid to hit a woman.

Iggy stared at the ground and carried on toward the diner that he ate at every day, three times a day. It wasn’t as good as Barrigas diner in his hometown of Ciudad Juárez, but he always said it was at least a notch above pig slop. When he arrived, Iggy sat down abruptly, rocking the booth a few inches back across the linoleum flooring. Everyone turned for a second to see what the commotion was, but they all quickly looked away again. The afternoon shift servers were huddled in the corner arguing over who would be serving Iggy that day. “It was my turn yesterday, Sarah. You know the rules. It’s your day. Don’t be such a little bitch about it. We all have to do it.” In most establishments, it’s a common urban legend that if you make the kitchen angry, they’ll spit in your food. Iggy, however, was usually the one doing the expectorating in this case. Every time he ordered, he complained his food was wrong. He’d spit in it, calling it gutter sewage, and demand it be remade. This, of course, was always after he ate the first half of his meal. When he finished, he’d always leave the exact dollar amount in cash on the table, wadded up into a ball. There was never a cent more. Some days, he wouldn’t pay at all. Everyone knew him, everyone hated him, and everyone feared him. 

As was his daily custom, Iggy finished up his meal, left the diner, and headed down the highway, past overpass that overlooked the underbelly of town. Most people avoided this path, deeming it unsavory, as this was where all the junkies hid, passing around dirty needles to plunge under their HIV-infected tongues. Not Iggy. Iggy would routinely take this path to indulge his proclivity for kicking the ever-loving shit out of the beggars whose half-dead bodies littered the train tracks. Everyone needs a hobby, he reasoned. He carried on, ignoring the desperate pleas of those around him. On his way down the alley that led to his home, he noticed a local H dealer camped out in his ’84 Datsun. With little to no hesitation, he punched in the window, sending the dealer into a frenzy of rage. He scrambled for his pistol but Iggy was faster. He grabbed the back of Hollywood’s head and slammed it into the remnants of jagged glass, perforating his left eye. Hollywood yelped like a small dog, and rolled out of the car into the alleyway in the fetal position. Iggy stepped over the crumpled body in front of him and grabbed the keys to the jalopy off of the hook on Hollywood’s tattered jeans before driving off into the sunset like the hero of a bad romantic comedy.

Iggy sped down the highway to his target’s location, five counties away. He had killed 48 people since he was only thirteen. This mark was nothing special to him, save that he was one person closer to his glorious golden kill.  He kicked down the door of the dilapidated house on the corner and began immediately charging toward Jose Villanueva with a Bowie knife in his hand. With unbridled grace and absolutely no sound, Iggy plunged the knife directly into Jose’s carotid artery, prompting the blood to splatter all over his Persian rug as he collapsed to his knees and clutched his neck, erupting into tiny squawks, like a newborn puppy. Iggy had little patience for the process of dying. He made certain that his targets were always quick and clean kills, lest he have to stand around and wait to make sure the job was done. He hated waiting.  As he left the scene of his crime, he knocked over the marble urn of Jose’s grandmother’s ashes that were nestled tightly into the corner of his bookshelf and shuffled his feet through the cloud of remains that lay scattered on the ground. 49.

As he encroached on the fourth and final hour of his drive back home to his studio apartment, he couldn’t help but feel bored. Killing just wasn’t what it used to be for him anymore, but there’s no such thing as a promotion for a hitman. Nothing was a challenge for him anymore, the thrill of the kill was gone. As he tossed a cigarette butt out the window, the light turned red, positioning him fifth in a row of cars directly in front of the train tracks, which he came to a sudden halt in front of. The 85 year old woman behind him stopped abruptly on the tracks. “Dumb broad,” he thought. Then came a rumble in the distance, followed by a bellowing horn. The train was coming straight for Mrs. Cooper. Quickly, the cars in front of Iggy began to pull to the side of the road, one by one, making room for Mrs. Cooper to pull forward, narrowly escaping certain death. The train was now a promised threat, furiously approaching the Station Wagon resting directly over the steel tracks. All that remained was for Iggy to pull a mere three feet to the side, leaving room for Mrs. Cooper to pull forward, effectively saving her fragile life. He thought back to the hollow in him, and the longing for the kind of shock that kills once brought him. He desperately missed that icy feeling in his veins. People had now begun congregating in the street, beckoning Mrs. Cooper to exit her car as quickly as she could, but her hip replacements rendered her legs nearly useless. Panic filled the air. With a smile on his face, Iggy realized that this was it. This was his golden kill. He calmly engaged his parking brake to ensure that his stolen car wouldn’t move. For the first time in years, he felt that icy thrill. He leapt from the Datsun and darted away, the sound of his frantic footsteps echoing through his ears. His heart raced as he disappeared into labyrinth of alleyways in the distance with a schoolgirl smile on his face. Then there came a sound. Distant first, then grew into a howl that engulfed miles around. Bystanders screamed in horror. Limbs catapulted forward and backward, while the rest of what was Mrs. Cooper only seconds before was liquidated, dripping from the mangled car parts now fused with the front of the screeching train. Iggy stopped behind a dumpster and surveyed the area. No one had followed him. They had all been too caught up in the horror that we all feed on to make our lives more meaningful in some way to notice which direction he’d gone. Iggy scoffed to himself, lit another cigarette, and put his boot to the ground toward the diner. 50.

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Adventuring.

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Shot this lovely couple of new brides and their fur babies over the weekend.

#alitaphotography #centralflorida #family #photography #portraits #love #pride

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I shot a whole family.

#photography #Portraits #centralflorida #Alitaphotography #family

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I bought a new camera but I’m hiding it because I owe my mom money.

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Hiking.

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Arizona.

#arizona #nature #mountains #elk #peace

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Unfortunate Things You Learn As a Woman Living with Anxiety

1. Up all night, drowning in anxiety? No problem, just use eye brightening concealer and light, shimmering eyeshadow.

2. You know the precise locations of every emergency exit everywhere you go.

3. People don't notice a single, clean cut in plain sight.

4. "Not too shabby" is a passable reply when asked how you're doing.

5. Dressing and accessorizing well draws attention away from the misery on your face.

6. Need to drop a few pounds? Just eat a trigger food.

7. If you can push yourself to the brink of insanity, your brain will short circuit, you will depersonalize, and you can function as a robot.

8. You're literally always mentally prepared to put a "go bag" together in 3 minutes flat, because you've imagined every emergency scenario possible, 3,000 times each.

9. Hysteria burns calories... quickly.

10. You can identify every single sound you hear outside your home with little to no effort, because you've been mentally cataloging them forever.

#anxiety #women with anxiety #panic #coping

[mckatalyst]

On Writing and Fear

I have a strange relationship with writing, as I do with most people, places, and things in life, I suppose. It’s my first love. I can’t imagine a lifetime in which I couldn’t put pen to paper, or feel the soul calibration that comes from resting my hands on my keyboard. It’s a kind of veritable dependency... one which I have never fully overcome. Much a like a drug, it is both euphoric and terrifying. I’m 28 years old. I’ve been writing in journals and in notebooks since I was about 8. In that entire time, I’ve never outgrown my fear of sitting down and writing, especially when a substantial amount of time passes, It’s a feeling akin to guilt. Writing has saved my life countless times, whether it was in letters, blogs, or journals. On the days I felt the most alone in my life, the blank canvases I filled up with words were there for me. It never left me. There is a clear, distinctive difference in my person when I’ve been writing and when I have not. Despite knowing this, I still refrain. I started thinking today about why that is exactly. Is it that I’m too lazy? Is it that I don’t believe I have a right to put into reality what lives within me? Is it something else? And in the midst of all of these jarring noises in my head, I heard a very clear one. ...It was the sound of a ghost telling me that I need to write so I don’t forget how to be me, accompanied by images of a Dr. Seuss composition book being passed to me. Write “How to Kat,” he told me. It was in this epiphany that I realized where my fear stems from. I live everyday ruminating over my worst fears, my biggest regrets, and my darkest thoughts. When I write, it’s like entering a sort of confessional. I have to tell the truth or it swallows me whole. I am very aware that the things swimming inside of me are poisonous to me and everyone I care most about. I don’t want to see it; to breathe it into reality. It is in this that I am faced with my worst enemy: myself. To write is to go to war with oneself. I’m afraid that once I start bleeding in text, I won’t be able to cauterize my wounds. Yet, in the face of all of these glorious reasons I have to not write, after a time, I have to. It’s a stronger urge than I’ve ever known. Part of me is afraid of you, the reader. I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me... how you’ll perceive me and judge me. Will you misunderstand me like people so often do when I am out milling about during my everyday life? Will you be bored? Will I change you, or will my innermost workings be cast into the void, only to float around aimlessly forever? It’s daunting, to say the very least. There is a kind of disconnect that happens between my head and my heart when I write. There is no filter. It is my looking glass, and truth be told, I’m afraid of what I’ll come face to face with. I am afraid of my own voice. Becoming aware of this made me realize that now, more than ever, I needed to lean into the wind. It’s the only way I’m going to survive, even though I’m afraid that once I start, I won’t be able to stop. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’re beginning to wonder if I’m actually going anywhere with this, or if I’m going to pull a “Hook” (by Blues traveler) on you, and simply spend a bunch of time writing about writing. I’m approaching the basis of this blog entry. Over the course of my life, I’ve loved a lot of people. I would venture to guess that I’ve loved more people more intensely than most people ever love even one person. It’s a beautiful gift, but also, a curse. When I am in a relationship with someone, I become enmeshed in them... never really LOSING myself in the relationship, but being dwarfed by it. I breathe so much life into the social construct of my relationships, and what society acknowledges as a relationship, that everything else stops mattering. I never forget HOW to Kat. I only forget that I have to keep doing it, or I’m not living my life at all. Recent events in my life had resurrected a dormant awareness of my codependency in relationships. My anxiety and fear of abandonment grabs me by the throat and drags me through the day. It makes all of my choices for me, and defines my character. It leads me down dark alleys in which I abuse and manipulate the one I love the most, effectively weakening my bond with that person and often, myself. I’m so afraid of being abandoned and not being good enough that I begin devaluing my partner so I don’t have to feel left behind, or like the one I love the most has outgrown me. It’s a vicious cycle that has robbed me of the greatest love I’ve ever known, and one that keeps me alone. I spend a lot of time thinking about my failures in my relationships, and how much I have lost. I wish I didn’t, but ruminatively cataloguing my shortcomings is my homeostasis. I imagine that at one point, it was something I chose, but it no longer is. My fear runs my life, as I know it does for so many. In spite of this, I’m afraid to fail and to get hurt, to move on. I’m afraid to be just like you. I’m afraid to be human. I’ve never seen myself as a person so much as an idea. I don’t really exist, and therefore am exempt from everything that is commonplace. You have different rights than I do. You deserve more. You’re accountable for more. I am the exception, or at least that’s what I’ve always believed. I’ve never fancied myself as better or worse, necessarily... just different. Because of this, I often shove down all of the ME things that attract people to me in the first place when I’m in a relationship. I clutch tightly to the idea of a relationship, complete with a rigid and oftentimes impossible set of standards and expectations of myself and my partner. This makes me a hypocrite. At my core, I am a free spirit. I need to roam. I need adventure. I need a soul connection without the confines of a label and expectations. I need pure and unconditional love, and I give it back freely, until I don’t anymore. I’ve begun to reflect on how much I change when I enter a relationship. I treat it like a thing that can be owned, controlled, measured, calculated, even though I don’t want to, and I know it can’t be. A relationship is the bond between people, not the words they use to describe it. No matter how deeply I believe this to be true, I can never seem to be able to abide by it for very long. I’ve only ever known truly unconditional, pure love twice, and both of those people have been crushed under the weight of my emotional instability and iconoclast antics. They are no longer in my life because the poison in me swallowed up the best of all of us. At a certain point, I stopped protecting myself, so I stopped protecting them. I stopped giving them MY energy and only gave them an obsessive, neurotic, desperate fear-based energy. I’ve learned from this, and I suppose that means that these loves were not in vain, but it doesn’t make me any less ashamed. I am clothed in my own grief, woven by my fear of myself. To the men who shared my soul, and who allowed me to share theirs, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did this to you. I’m sorry I did this to me. Thank-you for loving me wholly, and teaching me how to love wholly. I promise you, I will be better, and it’s because of you. To my writing, thank-you for always being there for me. To my readers, may they exist and may they make themselves open to me, never change. Never lose your voice. Never lose your faith. Never lose your soul. Never lose yourself.

#writing #fear #growth #lessons #love #twinflames #soul #truth #selflove #regrets #change #gratitude #humility #infp #writer #ego

[mckatalyst]

i am afraid that if i open myself i will not stop pouring. (why do i fear becoming a river. what mountain gave me such shame.)

Jamie Oliveira, “Erosion” (via wordsnquotes)

[mckatalyst]

I am an emotional pack rat.