♫ -- a drabble inspired by the next song on shuffle.
Bones & Skin || Mirah [ x ]
If you live inside the old graveyard,
your skin and bones get kind of hard.
You blame it on all of the ones who left you.
How absently you move around, how listless.
How, in the night, the battle raged —
under the blankets, were we brave?
At least enough to recognize the storm is just a storm?
Some things are out of their control. Some things get out of hand, and some things can’t be taken back. Sometimes, I’m sorry, isn’t enough — even if I forgive you falls from another person’s lips, it’s not the same, and the guilt still weighs like a lead ball in the stomach. Sometimes he can’t look in the mirror. Sometimes he can’t look the others in the eye. How do they all do it? How do they go about their days?
Because they’re not like you, is the obvious answer; he is not of them, not with them. He is something other, an observer through the cracked glass — lenses that should be replaced, that turn his stomach to look at, to look through. He’s invited out of courtesy, but he doesn’t always go. Sometimes he can’t stand the way they look at him — they way they jump when he shouts, the uncertainty in their eyes when he smiles at them.
A constant wearing away of skin will cause it to thicken, to build more layers to protect the sensitive nerves beneath — but every glance cuts him open, lays him bare to the bone, and he is ever-wounded, ever tender to the touch, a gouged out center laid out for all to see. What happened isn’t entirely his fault, but he carries the burden all the same, and it drags him down to his knees some nights, a mockery of prayer to someone who doesn’t listen.
There is someone who does listen though — and his hands are rough when he clasps him on the shoulder, as calloused as his own, but his expression and words are soft, and he doesn’t deserve it, doesn’t deserve it at all, because if he’d gotten one good chance, one good shot, he’d have killed him out there, he’d have put a bullet in him, he’d have held him under those waves and drowned him, he’d have melted him, instead of melting for him, as he does now, pooling at his knees and hugging his waist, and asking forgiveness he’d gotten the first time he’d asked it, and every time after.
With thunder and lightning raging, with dark clouds hanging over the city, it’s easy to forget that there’s something beyond that skyline, that there’s a world not soaked to the bone, that there’s a place where rain doesn’t make rivers in the gutters. That there are places in the world where he couldn’t scream himself raw at the sky and never be heard, and that there are places where he wouldn’t even feel the need to do so. The wind howls, and he feels he should howl with it, a wolf abandoned by its pack, angry and frightened and alone, hiding in a cave, too dumb to know that the storm will end, it always ends.
A calm voice, fingers stroking through his hair, they tell him to look for the breaks, where the rain is lighter, where the sun shines through, and he thinks it’s impossible, but in the warm dark, huddled under a blanket, with his head tucked under a familiar-unfamiliar arm, buried against a shoulder, he thinks maybe he doesn’t need the light as much as he needs the dry, the quiet, the warmth; he doesn’t need it to stop raining — he just needs a shelter to wait it out in.
And maybe, just maybe, he’s found that.