Ruby Red Marionette

twelve | rainbow

 It had been dark forever.

I had been running for days by the time I reached the studio, and my conversation with my mother lasted a year. When I left, I walked in the direction of nowhere for a decade, and then I made a decision about where to go. Since then, it had been about three centuries. Still, the haunting indigo hues of the sky had not lightened and my feet had not exploded from being on fire for so long.

I was convinced that the night would not end. I ran away from someone’s dead body instead of calling for help, and I was already in hell paying for my sins. They say that hell is only a permanent manifestation of your state of mind; if so, then the galvanizing chill in my spine when Isaiah desperately searched for Carlos’ pulse would be here for a while.

I stopped running. If this really was permanent, then I didn’t need to run. I didn’t need to try to race against time and fight for safety and attempt to escape this clown. I could let him take me. I could let myself slip into the cracks in the concrete where no rose would ever grow. I could allow myself not to do absolutely nothing, as I had been doing all my life.

That’s what hell was: an amplified reflection of the worst times of your life.

Running was better than this, this lethargic zombie-crawl that my body was stuck in. I couldn’t change my mind now, I couldn’t go back to caring about what happened to me. I had to stick with what I’d chosen, and what I’d chosen was to drag my feet along the streets, the sound of the soles of my Chucks scraping the sidewalk making my skin crawl. I didn’t have to hear it so loudly if I focused on other sounds, like the wind howling or the clanking of people’s front gates whenever I bumped into them. But, of course, willingly focusing on anything was a gift that I’d taken for granted long ago.

I thought about my mother, what she could possibly be doing right now. She was probably in her office with Zaria, sipping tea and talking about how much of an embarrassment I’d become. Zaria would agree and say that she hoped that my life turned around, that she couldn’t understand where I’d gone wrong. She was right. She was so, so right.

There was suddenly something catching my eye. Two things, two harshly familiar items that brought me relief at first and then a keen sense of fear and regret. Finally, I learned how to run again, and managed to run over to them. Milk and a newspaper on his doorstep. I couldn’t begin to think about what they could be doing here at this time. I picked them up and rapped on his door. Someone’s upstairs light turned on across the street; I was waking people up. I knocked on his door again, louder this time. Still no answer. It took a few seconds before it settled in, before I realized that if I was waking up other people with my knocking then I had to have woken Simon up. So that meant that he either had seen me from his bedroom window and chose to ignore me, or wasn’t home.

Both possibilities reminded me of how heavenly thoughts of suicide used to feel, and the memory made me break down. I leaned against the door, my tears blurring the ink on the paper. I decided to close my eyes. It was easier to bawl this way, when I could pretend that there was no one around me and I was floating through this dark, oblivious paradise.

But instead of enjoying this faux utopia, I thought. I let the run-on sentences and dangerous images come back into my mind, and then my head returned to being the spinning sphere it was before. As heavy as earth, as full as earth. As close to destruction as earth. If my mind really was this planet, I was living too close to the equator and global warming was in full force.

Then he opened the door.

I stumbled forward, almost slipping to a fall. He just stood before me, looking at me. His lack of expression was not a good sign. Simon wore his heart on his sleeve; I never had to wonder what he was feeling. So now, in this moment that I would probably remember forever, if I couldn’t tell what he thought of the mess that I’d become either meant that his expression was one that I’d never experienced or that I was too flustered to read him anymore.