Your childhood was made of staring at the fissured sky and waiting for the petrichor to wash the saline-streaked air that always enshrouded you. You found granules of salt clinging to your skin like an extra layer as you sat on the cold surface of the ship, remembering the shouting match that your parents held the moment you returned home drenched in sea water.
Your father was born to contain oceans within him, and your mother was always the shore’s daughter.
You, something solid in the middle, losing yourself in the limbo at the absence of belongingness. But you knew that you always belonged in the crevice of the attic, where your father had buried his old dreams, transferring those into your veins without his consent. You smudged your fingers with ink from the smeared prints, coveting something that was far too young for a girl your age. You would run to your mother when the nightfall beckoned, hoping for an early bedtime story. At the crook of the evening, you were always delighted by the rivulets of tales that streamed from her mouth. You swam to the land far away; away from the shelter that was barely enough to protect you from the storm.
*
Four was when the memory of your brother’s face embedded itself for the first time at the back of your mind, and you curled your fingers around those little ones to retell the stories that your mother had told you. (He was asleep. He didn’t understand.)
Six was when you ran out of the stories, skipping towards your parents’ room to request for another from your mother, only to see her bend over her drawers. Heaving, bleeding. Her heart was a torn organ that skimmed the pain inflicted on her for years and years to come. She whispered apologies as she let the salt water painted her cheeks with shame (and they were empty, empty, empty—empty apologies for an empty daughter from an empty mother). You turned around before you watched her step over the threshold.
Your father’s stories always involved a tremble for his lost beloved. Losing one was a lot. Losing two was too much.
He lost the third in the sea; a part of himself that never returned again.
*
You were always the November’s child, born amidst the season of decay to remind yourself that nothing ever blossomed and remained beautiful forever. You fell in love with the hurricane when you were ten, staying out on your birthday to soak yourself in the rainwater. Sometimes it smelled like your father’s skin on the weary late nights, staggering with a mixture of subtle alcohol scent. When your brother brought you an umbrella, you clasped his wrist and made him promise to take care of your father if you were to be swallowed whole by the deluge of autumn.
You didn’t let go until he swore that he would. (He was a liar. He didn’t understand.)
*
At thirteen you tasted the tongue of a boy two years older shoved down your throat, and you choked.
He breathed an ocean and carried a kingdom. He wrote cited poems on the back of your hand and smoked cigarettes at the back of his house when his parents weren’t home; telling you to take a sip of his black coffee as you watched the smokes billowing from the crannies of his mouth. You started learning the shapes of his teeth and naming them like the constellations for that was how they felt against the tip of your tongue. You shivered when his fingers pressed themselves against your wrist, your pulse beating beneath his reign.
He said he loved you for you reminded him of the home that he never had, and you loved him for the secondhand adventures that he lent you from his lazy voice.
Your father’s experience in loving and losing was no longer a vicarious experience when you were fourteen.
*
You witnessed as your father wobbled towards his room, engulfed in the darkness until his figure was nothing but a tattered silhouette, reminding you that he used to be more of a man than a lurching shadow. You were awake when he wasn’t, braiding brambles until you punctured your fingertips.
There wasn’t much to remember until you climbed into the bus that one day after graduation, flickering lights becoming nothing but a dollop of blurry mess as you left the city that had never left you for eighteen years of your life. Under the lull of the moonlight, you thought you could make it under the name of fortune, springing from the foundation of wandering fantasies and brimming beliefs. You chased after the horizon blindly, forgetting to look back. (To look up.)
You stumbled; once, twice.
You tasted the dirt.
You blinked.
*
You were a blooming lilac, finding yourself in a corner of the washing room bathed in red lights. Your hands were calloused from the long hours of daydreaming; mundane work allowed your mind to travel. What you didn’t expect, however, was for your reveries to end up shattered beneath the weight of someone’s libido. He lit you like a matchstick and you were a stack of hay, ruining your melodies into ashes and tendrils of coughs. You sputtered, tasting the ricocheting rust within your cavity.
You pleaded for help but your limbs were far too weak, your bones a terrible calamity. You pleaded for help but your throat was constricted, your scream dying at the base of your tongue.
You started wilting.
*
You are a story filled with abandoned letters and fingers smudged with ink. Strewn across the room are undelivered prayers that you wish to send home, but you’re lost. You don’t know your way back, losing yourself in the sky of livid bruises inflicted by nights of adventures you never wanted to travel through. Your mind is hazy, drowned in the thoughts that feel like the borrowed entities as you spread your legs for strangers. They invite themselves in.
(They never knock. They never knock. You bleed and you scream and they never go away.)
Here’s to tracing the notches of your spine and counting them until the night turns pitch black.
You used to be a floral ribcage, branches twined with the sprigs of innocence, blooming and fissuring the bones, pulverizing them and turning you gentle. Words in your mouth weighted like penance. Dust on your fingertips felt like memories. There would be a smile to replace your lips, and rapture to fist your beating heart. Pulsating, breathing. Your days dreamed of sleeping awake and your nights of eternal sun.
You used to be nothing in everything, everything in nothing.
You used to be the spectrum in his life, the regret in his death.
Draw a line.
Flesh and blood rot in the wrap of decaying skin. Your apocalypse comes in eight letters. Insanity is hereditary. Think of butterfly kisses on her shoulder blades. Think of teeth that bit its tongue it bled fragments. Think of the manic heart that colored the gashed alley. Think of demise painted in the grotesque scene.
Think of tragedy. A walking tragedy.
Think of lining yourself in the death row, mouthing his elegy.
Lay your body bare. Speak the truth with the ridges of your backbones.
First—
Dying wishes are relative. Look into the mirror and say that you’re fine. Look into the mirror and forge what you see.
On bent knees you’re nothing if not innocence, a litany of the withering belief in a child’s mind. In praying hands you’re nothing if not naivety, your prayers spinning a cloak that renders you blind. You like it, being blind. It reminds you of home. It reminds you of the boy smiling back at you in the puddle of rainwater.
Second—
Drown yourself in a pint of free verses.
The darkness in you doesn’t exist to shrink; they expand by universe and eat you alive. Veneering yourself in black, this is what you are: bloodstains on snow. You breathe greatness and shiver, lungs corroded with a promise of selflessness. You have your own definitions of kindness, the first letter involving choking yourself alive with cruel fingers. The second letter feels like setting yourself ablaze. The last letter is submerged in the sound of sirens wailing.
Third—
You’re not as blind as you’d like yourself to be. But you pretend. You pretend until you pretend you can’t see your pretense.
A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours’ time by Mrs. Dursley’s scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley…He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices:
"To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!”
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
