Sometimes I forget how hard it is for me to breathe. When they’re around. How the heat between them is like a sticky side of the underbread and their moist tongues so soiled with hatred, simmering hatred stuffed under the pots and pans, that they’ve forgotten to pretend to notice. And when I slip backwards, shed the limelight and watch them, hear the way he makes her cry, hear the way she makes him beg. It’s all so shrill, all so twisted in some vortex of steel and sympathy. A cacophony of cries. And you’ve never felt so worthless as when your name gets trickled down like a lost pet, like a needle that sticks up at your skin and keeps scratching and scratching and scratching. And while one clings to the clothes for their life, the other’s been pushing to burn them for months, years.
I am naught but a burnt rag.
Sometimes I forget how much it sucks to hear them fight. How much I quiver in fear at the thought that someday I, too, will venture into the realm of love and romance. For after all, that was where this began, was it not? Or was it merely an unplanned pregnancy that smushed the two together, like two cheeks and fat rolling around in grimacing smiles and crackling flashbulbs. And all this time it’s been so hidden, they’ve thought common sense to swim from the gene pool. But I watch and I see and I wonder if I will cascade into this shimmering trap. If metal fangs will pierce my ankle, watch me struggle and bleed as I weep just to touch the shining sting once more. And thrusting fingertips into gaping bone, vein, tentacles of destruction winding through my ripped limb and squelching blood…tiny eyes will watch in my stead, sucking in breath like seaweed and pushing their skin from their body.
Innocence is relative. Purity the same. And whilst I keep one close to my pocket, the other strokes like catfish whiskers at my fingertips and swishes away. I choose to purge myself of reliance if only to keep that which I hold dear at bay from the greedy mongers, from those who would see me fall. And the failures and the mortgages and the crying toddlers that wail their mother’s name as she stares at them in grief, astonished grief. It is all for the watching eyes and watching hand, for the weakness of the day as they forgot their independence, ventured into the cushion that would see them dumped. So swaddle me in mummy’s wraps and squeeze my paper hand.
I will lie in this sarcophagus and you will close the lid.
.me.
1 comment:
One day, it will be your words read aloud in English classes and disected as people decide in your absence the meaning of your existance and how your felt and why. And you'll be a legend; a famous writer that students will be taught to loathe for never living up to your talent and teachers will misinterpret under the guise of knowing better than you ever did. It is the curse of the writer to never be understood, no matter how clear our tone.
Post a Comment