#short scribble

[scribblesofanaricat]

Once upon a time that lives only in the very back of my head now, visibility - acceptance - welcomes - were just words to me, for the most part. Any gleam of solace was something to be stolen in odd fistfuls and then stuffed into a corner of my heart as quickly as it came.

Two precious little pins, all too often kept hidden deep in a backpack pocket or an old pencil case, more so than they could ever be worn. The blazing colours of my name, my name, blended and brushed on the keyboard of a distant friend or the lips of a classmate. A tiny refuge carved into the internet where only those who mattered could find me.

It felt like - not a call, no, nothing so loud - but a murmur just for me. Not a dazzling burst of sun, but a streetlight’s glow upon a rain-jewelled pavement. Messages left in invisible ink.

We know you’re there. We see you. And we’re here too.

Some of it, I don’t really need anymore. Yet so many do, far too many. So today it’s them that I think of, wrapping those thoughts in my embrace, warming that embrace with murmurs of my own, and maybe, just maybe, some part of it will make it through to where it’s longed for the hardest and deserved the most.

I’m here. I see you.

I know you’re there.

[scribblesofanaricat]

This is not a place of permanence.

It caves, wilts, pulls itself in half, fifths, tenths, hundredths. It knits back together in an unrecognisable pattern, unsaveable in hand or heart, or choosing not to be.

(Your shadow is not a shadow.)

A nowhere that follows you everywhere. That makes sound when nobody is around to hear it. The sun hangs there, as new and as worldly as a recycled fable. Four billion years have worn on it all the same. It grows tired. Its sleep is fitful.

(The sky seethes. Not with stars. With eyes stitched shut. With wounds gouged deep into infinity.)

Footprints line up where sea and land and sky blur together, never in the same place twice. A little further ahead. An inch to the left. Maybe a touch deeper, clearer, every time, like a child pencilling and erasing their signature over and over. Somebody of eight or eighteen or eighty can slip their foot inside any one, every one, and watch it fit perfectly. Cinderella in salt-brewed mud, dewed by a rain that didn't fall, never will.

This is not a place of permanence.

(It's gone now. Like those blinks in the dark we call life.)

Your shadow is not a shadow.

[scribblesofanaricat]

Satan’s rollercoaster. Shivers burrowing under the flames charring his body. This isn’t the first time that thought’s dragged itself across his brain this is it day or night.

His head is thunder. Everything, anything, else has slammed to a stop. He could swear rollercoasters are meant to stop. So are storms. Aren’t they?

Cold teeth sinking into the back of what was once his knee. Can’t be some orphan splinter of mirror. There isn’t one. Mirrors are stupid, spiteful things...taunting him with nothing he ever recognises.

Needle. Probably. Not worth flailing his hand around to look at. Any lifeline it ever had on it was bled dry months and days and minutes and how long has he been lying here ago. The tiny bruises trailing his veins tell him so.

It's so cold this summer.

Drips tumble through the ceiling, always tracing the same path along the arm thrown over his eyes, the all too flesh-and-blood one. Where’s the other one. It doesn’t matter now.

Whenever it gets too quiet, the ones who aren’t here howl his name. Its letters drip poison through his skull.

He lies, and lies, and lies. Half past dead and stone cold sane.

[scribblesofanaricat]

Out in deadlands, hung up on chapters and possibilities, today’s flowers spread themselves at my feet, tilting their snowy heads in my direction, studying me. I study them back in defiance of my drowned senses.

It happens at odd moments like these, in glowing mutiny and in grey shuffling: they come to me, master of a paper throne where their candelabra gaze binds my hands and their words’ toll plays over my heart.

“Meet yourself,” they intone. “Meet yourself and recollect yourself. Ask them what they want. Ask them what they are.”

[scribblesofanaricat]

There’s hardly anyone here now; of the four creatures who regularly occupy this room, one is away for what could be seven hours yet and the other, fluffier, four-legged one just darted out of the door and poured herself down the stairs like a tiny rainstorm.

Her sudden movement is what prods me out of my abstraction into realising that I’m cold. The window I nudged open for her earlier hangs open still, beckoning in the characteristic chill of a British October evening. Almost automatically, my arm stretches out to clap it shut - and my eyes end up snagged by the view on the other side.

Something that still holds a vague amazement for me is that I don’t have to be up here, nor do I have to gaze at the horizon wishing myself far, far away, nor listen for a slam of the door or rapid footsteps on the stairs, tied to the spot by the knots in my chest. I choose to be here anyway, though. Maybe because I’m still too used to it, but maybe just because it’s nice. Silent, save for a blend of voices drifting from downstairs, but nice. I can examine my new reflection - new only when compared to the one termed mine for two decades, of course - in the windowpanes. The short hair, the dark blue glasses. The clothes I picked out for myself and never have to be told I’m wrong about. I can stare out into the slate-hued sky and half-lit houses and know that I’m free, that to send me back would be to kill me, that I can and do breathe fresh air after so long beneath somebody’s heel.

I drink it in, this odd gold-dusted peace (somewhat thin on the ground even after a year) where my mind can float in half-dreams and half-thoughts.

It has to end soon. I’ll be called out of the room and back into reality for dinner, or the dog draped over the carpet behind me will rouse himself and stretch and time will start again. Until then, though, I think I can take a few minutes to sit. To appreciate the safety curling around my shoulders like a well-loved blanket. To bottle it and tuck it away somewhere inside me.

To be home.

[scribblesofanaricat]

They're supposed to be perfect. At the very least, unfailing. Tireless. Any clinical word those smoke-haze voices snagging at the weaves of their memory would wrap it up in.

Whatever it is...this isn't it.

That fact drips scarlet from the gashes lacing their hands and beads its letters onto the ground.

It climbs the splintered ladder of their ribs, brands itself in the yellow-mottled purple edging its rungs and staining their casing. Shell. Skin.

It throbs under their neck as they hunch low, lower, lower, until the miles of nothing around them blur with a tangle of hair - and of wires, wires gleaming in a way that could almost be called soft, a web spun over every corner of their existence - that they wish they could pretend felt like their own. But if it was, then they wouldn't be this in the first place. Would they?

They should never, ever be this. Defective. Defect.

Defect.

“This is unbelievable. Charge it again.”

Lights, too many lights, flashing glare after glare over and through every inch of them. Again. Crackling along their cables, their nerves. Again. Jerking with powerless limbs. Crying out through a still, silenced tongue.

It.

Their optics burn; a faint grey swarms the fringes of their vision. It’s a threadbare routine. Forgetting to blink, to breathe.

Forgetting.

There’s something in forgetting. A glimmer. Maybe...maybe a life - and every string of coding infused with their mind tells them that doesn’t work out. But they think otherwise.

Their body sways against the wall standing at their back (granite, seven inches thick, perhaps barely older than they are), guided by a slack tug of the exhaustion they were never supposed to feel.

A life. For a defect.

That, at least, is one thing it can’t take from them.

[scribblesofanaricat]

I lie enfolded by blankets,

arms scrabbling in their search for a stuffed friend,

almost awake but for the echoes of drowsy dreams

still playing upon me.

Over on the far wall

fogged by my unglassed eyes,

stray streaks of watery sunlight shimmer and stir

as though ruffled by the wind's cool breath,

a rock pool of the palest liquid gold.

This is being.

And this is okay.

[scribblesofanaricat]

then let me be monstrous

let me grow ten, twenty, thirty feet tall. let my teeth sharpen and hooked horns lance through my head, coils crawl over my skin and eyes down the ridges of my spine

let souls and cities alike shudder beneath my barest whisper: can you hear me now, do you see me now? let firestorms play on my blackened tongue. contagion breathe under the razor edges of my fingernails. my laugh hail down like so much shattered glass

oh

let me be

a monster too