“Come back, Eri,” she whispers in her sister’s ear. “Please come back.”

Eri is lost. She does not know how this has happened and yet it has. She is trying to get back to Mari but she has been lost for longer than she would like to admit and she is fighting a losing battle.

She has been fighting this battle with a monster; her monster. Her monster looks like Mari, but then again, it looks like her too. Her monster has been harassing her for a long time. If she thinks hard enough, she can recall her monster fully appearing three years ago but if she’s honest she’ll know that it’s been with her most of her life. Haunting her. Encroaching on her life-force until it wears away like the sea on sedimentary rock.

Her monster does not have a name or more so, she hasn’t given it a name. She hasn’t even given it a gender for she knows that if she gives it more power, she is taking power away from herself.

Her monster has made her do things she not proud of – one of them being barely 18 and in a back alley. She thinks she sleeps with people she does not know to gain some sort of intimacy as she refused to allow herself for a long time. Apart from Mari she has distanced herself from her family, member by member.

This fight with her monster has made Eri realise that she cannot win. Not on her own at least. She has found ways to help however, she decided to opt for sleeping pills. In the beginning they worked beautifully, her first night of straight nine hours of sleep in weeks was glorious. But eventually even those didn’t work, and she refused to up the dosage, fearing that she may get addicted to them.

Now she wishes she has upped the dosage. The sleeping pills would have (at worst) given her daytime drowsiness and burning sensations in her hands and legs. The drugs she has now, do help her sleep but this is not the sleep she was initially hoping for. This sleep is an unconsciousness that she cannot wake from, and yet she knows she doesn’t want to. This unconsciousness grants her with the chance to escape her monster. Granted, that unconsciousness has halted her appetite and made her skin cling to her frangible bones. She has always wanted to know what a real skeleton looks like and now she can see her own when she can force herself to stand up to look in the mirror. She never knew how hollow the space around her eyes were until her skin fell into it like sugar through a funnel.

Her teeth have yellowed, she has had to use whitening toothpaste when she is awake enough to see Mari. She can’t let Mari see too much of her worsening health; can’t let her monster affect Mari as well.

Eri knows that Mari is losing her sister a little bit more everyday. But she cannot find her strength to fight her monster anymore. With each dosage and each injection Eri can feel herself slipping into her place of tranquility. The waves of slumber wash over her and pull her further and further into a new comatose state.