I'm growing softer, malleable almost. My bones liquid ivory, like milk they slosh around inside of my body, the skin barely holding it all in. I am growing into the girl I never wished to be. My memories are tear-filled nights and masked days, the bruises on my body show just as much as the lacerations in my mind. They never stop bleeding, did you know that?
At night you emerge with your whips
and chains, your tongue at ready to tear and rend what is not yours. I have
long submitted to it in my mind but outwardly you seem to see me fight. Why
else do you wield your weapons even more cruelly than before?
There’s a sinking feeling now when
you’re gone, lost are the days of happy anticipation of a word from my
favourite person. This body you used to hold has grown cold. I no longer
remember who you are. Breaks are filled with a hollow dread of loss even though
you still exist. You remain and yet something is gone.
Like a fruit gone bad, I squish
myself into a ball as best I can, wedging the pillows into the hollows your
body used to fill. I can almost sense the ghost of you there but when I tell
you so you pretend not to hear. I dismiss it and move on to my alter-ego who I
adopted at your behest, bright, cheery me. I will put up this mask for as long
as it takes for you to remember who you were before. All that accompanies me is
a prayer, heartfelt and worn around the edges like my mind. I hold my thoughts
at night and worry at them till they fray and possibly, hopefully begin to
unravel and make sense of you.
The sun brings tears of a different
kind that I struggle to blink away. I wilt now, softening in the light as I
emerge into the world and go about pretending to be human, to be whole. Deep
inside, my spine curls in on itself like a flower whose stem is dying for lack
of water. Or perhaps it is simply roots it lacks.
I can paint my face but it still
remains porcelain pale. This flower deemed unfit for the table because it
wouldn’t bend just so, it still tries to bloom, crushed petals and all. Mother
says I’ve seen a ghost and I agree. It was the ghost of you. And me.
~ Rachel Alexandrina
