cherry lime.
I’ve always noticed something different about you, more notably, something that differs in me whenever I’m in your presence. It’s a feeling of fondness, mixed irritably with a lurking sense of a certain something sinister that I’ve yet to articulate into words. Perhaps it’s the citrusy aftertaste of the candies you had brought over from last week’s family gathering that I kept sealed in a jar tucked away under my bed. I’ve learned to savour the bits before bedtime. When I could rinse my mouth and have the cooling minty scent of the toothpaste harmoniously married to the sour, rowdy zest of the candy’s lime. My mother had told me to keep the treats to a limit, but I couldn’t resist the strange amalgamation of flavour that knocks me right off to bed feeling like I’d been swaddled in nature’s graze.
But it goes beyond the tastes you leave in my mouth. The dewy lavender smell that still resides within piles of new dresses you had gifted me on my birthday rendered my entire room in bloom. If you could see my energy radiating, skipping in dainty steps from room to room, your eyes would be all-consuming by a glowing pink veil of light reflecting off of flowery petals that adorn thin sheets of mousseline swathed around my waist. I’d dance across the marble floor, my small head tilting at every limping attempt to balance the floral crown that you’d placed on my head - enlacing strings of daisies that remind me how much of a princess I am even when you’re not around. Wouldn’t you realize, these are the moments an eight-year-old forever long to last.
So when the lavender dissipates into sharp, piercing notes of a stinging metallic pain the night I’d climb the window into your open arms, I had wondered if your daisy chains have snapped, too.
Because even though my throat struggles to make a sound, and my body intrinsically makes an effort to break out from your grasp, I couldn’t fathom you would ever hurt me, let alone leave a stinging cut where my muscles have yet learned to ache. Your needle, in its place, digs its teeth into my flesh, writhing and flailing like a living parasite drawing from me the purity I wish I had time to hold, before I’d lost the ability to discern what I have from what had ultimately become “yours”.
But what was done, was done through love,
The kind of achy-breaky, familial “love” that you’d always referenced back to. The love that, I’ve grown to learn, feeds until there wasn’t anything left to be consumed, until what is left to be tasted is a bitter acidic tang of what you had choked on, and gagged out in gush all on the floor.
The same floor I lie, with your periwinkle, now-cherry-coloured drape outlining my battered shape. I laid absorbing the ice cold current coursing through your winning ground, emptying whatever that is left still rippling inside my wilting body, and out through my slowly dimming eyes
