I'd always been too comfortable with holding onto people, never giving them the chance to hold on to me. I'd always be afraid that if they had held me, they'd leave just as soon. If they were in my arms, though, where could they run off to? How coul...
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The faucet is still running.
I've never liked the sound of running water. It's illusionary. This... false blanket of protection from the weighted quiet around us. When I was younger, the quiet would be muffled by the sound of the faucet and the occasional sad sigh that had always found a way to break through. It made my heart lurch and felt as though a warm blanket had been yanked from me in the middle of the night by monsters that had been lying in wait under the bed.
I used to believe in monsters. I thought they were under the bed, in the closet, underneath tables that had too long of cloths, waiting for the slightest limb to get too close to the edge, waiting for the right moment to get me. I don't believe in death anymore. I think everyone who lives is a steadily dying thing and that made me want the monsters to get me. After losing her, I wished they would. I used to scare myself, even still, by leaving a foot over the edge of the bed. I'd wait and watch for any shadowy movements, anticipating something that felt like it would happen at any gven moment. It never did, of course, because monsters aren't fans of living under the bed.
Each time I open my mouth, I close it the way my father closes his eyes. Each time I gear up to move and do something, the motivation sags like their ever drooping postures.
The last of daylight breaking through the window, with orange hues moving over my statue of a mother, bubbles rising around submerged wrists. I'm home now, I want to tell her. I can do the dishes, I want to say. My voice would be too animated. It'd be too loud, and I worry it would come off as a shock wave. I'd say it too cheerfully and that would break their carefully coordinated repetition. It might cause a malfunction of some kind.
I imagine them as robots on nights like these, and the slightest wrong step atop their eggshells would cause a shortage in their weathered wires. I don't want to be the reason they break anymore, so I sit quietly and watch them with my learned patience.
Emotions are heavy in those faraway eyes. Metal scrapes against plates, discarding food that no one had bothered to take a bite of. We'd sat and pretended for a few minutes and the lie fell through the gaps, spilling onto the dinner table, covering everything in the truth. We couldn't pretend. There was nothing left to do but clean up shortly after we'd sat down. I've never been able to determine what's worse-- sitting at the dinner table where we try and fail or dealing with the aftermath of each barely touched meal.
My parents weren't made for sitting. They were made for standing and preforming mundane tasks, vaguely aware of their surroundings, partaking in their vices and wishing their own monsters would catch them. Maybe then, they'd have some semblance of peace. My father will retire to smoke soon and my mother will drink until the liquid had either chased her sorrows away or amplified them. It is my last night among them. I will never again see my parents, and I don't think they would even have the mental capacity to notice. I didn't blame them, either. We were broken shards, too sharp for handling, big enough to cut one another into pieces and yet small enough that we barely see each other.
The silence seems to linger.
I killed someone tonight, I almost say.
I want to see something else on their faces. Shock, anger, horror. Anything but this sickening emptiness. My mother's eyes are hollow, her movements robotic and jerky. I think she'll stand there and clean the same cleaned plates until her feet ache, and even then, she might not even notice at all.
I've grown too accustomed to the animated chatter of campus life, so I suffocate in this hollow room, still not acclimated to the gray.
Each night spent here leaves my stomach so full of this sick feeling that I think I could live off of it for a few weeks. It's not the kind of pain you swallow down with anything else. Grief likes it best when you are sustained only by it. Grief is jealous like that.
I never understood why we turned things like this into poetry or meaningful messages. Grief was always just... gray, bland, uneventful, realistic. Grief was always lingering in the seasons, the milestones; it always looked like life moving on. What's beautiful about this? About the frailty of my mother, who hunches over the sink, her head dipped down, shoulders poking out from beneath her rumpled shirt? Where is the poetry in this house? What can I make beautiful in this sadness? There had been no roses that bloomed. There were only thorns left in the wake of my sisters passing. Thorns that had covered the ground and the walls, thick and spikey like towers rising from the staircase my parents still can't walk up.
That's all it was. Grief was gray, and blood was red, and there is nothing beautiful about that.
I killed someone tonight.
It's on the tip of my tongue, but I don't tell them. Instead, I quietly get up and leave the kitchen, leaving behind their sadness. I'll tell them tomorrow that I have an internship somewhere. I'll play it safe that way. Whoever is after me had already been inside of this haunted house. They'd already learned that my parents were too blind to be of any use. My parents would remain as safe as they always had, two lost causes left to their vices.
I'd already brought what I could from my dorm room and sort through my keepsakes. I wasn't sure what to bring with me and what to leave behind. What memories did I want to hold onto?
I don't cry in her room because that would be a dishonor. If she ever cried, it was publicly, because my sister was one for dramatics. A police officer once funded our entire meal because my sister had went bonkers over the fact we weren't getting a second appetizer. I think she just wanted extra fries, while I wanted something chocolate. He had been passing by when she waved him down and demanded he inform our parents of the law about not feeding your kids. She was a nightmare in the best of ways. He laughed, because children are adorable in their ridiculousness.
"The world doesn't work that way," he'd said after our parents intervened, mother red faced and father rubbing his temples. "But every now and again, princess, you'll find someone who thinks that should be the way the world works." And he'd funded our meal, fries and so much pie that I went home and threw up from eating so much. The kicker? Mel didn't even get grounded for that, because that nice officer had bought our parents something special, just for them. "Adult juice, for your big troubles over here." He'd said, hearty laugh following him as he went about his business, considering it a job well done.
If she was sad, she needed everyone to be made aware of that. She wouldn't have ruined her cheerful room with tears when they were useful elsewhere. Then again, she never had the time to, either. That was taken away from her. Everything was taken away from her in the end. I sit on the edge of her bed, stillness surrounding me, and close my eyes.
"I killed someone tonight." I confess. "I loved him, too."
Nothing responds, because there is no one there. I let my feet hang off the bed for good measure, thinking maybe something had crept into this tomb during my time away. I'm left alone. Incredibly, irreparably alone.
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<3 I'm not with the best internet right now, which sucks because I have FINALS but it's whatever. I can't get my headers to load in anywhere, which is disheartening.
It's just a little in-between book, happening during the events of Before You.
