Broken Stars On Broken Hearts

Chapter 2

I can't pretend I haven't been anticipating this.

Well, I don't think anticipation would even correctly describe it. Anticipation is normalcy. Anticipation is a young mother continuously in conception of her baby's cries, being lifted from her lethargic fog by the mere sight of the two perfect brilliant cut diamonds from her own eyes, tears perishing within the silken skinned descendant's as they are brought to their mother's breast for the beautiful nourishment that will keep them forming to read, to learn, to write, and to love. Anticipation is a well-handed worker sitting at the doorstep of the blare of the alarm clock settled besides him, listening in on the growing whisper of his chrome dreams, echoed only by his humbled snore. Anticipation is a little girl reuniting the final pieces of her broken doll, awaiting for her steadying voice of willpower to keep her excited fingers running long enough to find a porcelain face to once again meet hers, and to look into eyes to turn into whatever she wants. Anticipation is for something of nuisance, but also of a fleece of Love and Hope. In their purest forms.

Yeah, this definitely ain't it.

I'm not even sure if there's something that even remotely resembles a word to summarize how I feel.

I've spent a whole summer waking up every goddamn morning to feel the broken pieces of my heart fall to my back as they are thrown around by my very mind (the one thing that is also trying to keep this girl alive).

Only so many days until school starts... Drop.

Will the girls who loved my dead happiness keep alive their spark of spite towards the monster they see now? Drop.

Will the angel that once lit up my heart maybe, just maybe, return to endear me again, or will I be left abandoned in the darkness? Crash.

And everyday would disintegrate around me as worry filled my lungs, rattled my heart, shook my unripe-apple lips to see the tears fall around my face onto my bed sheets to meet the many others that came before them (I didn't try to stop the tears, by the way. I just let them go down my face. I didn't make the trouble of so constantly wiping a hand across my face.). And as I felt everything shake around me, trying to take every bleeding memory and construct it into something I could do to dodge the fiery, thieving pain that had seared through at the school before, I'd have to plaster a sudden grin on my face whenever Mom ordered me to mow the lawn, or when Dad offered to take me with him to work, or especially when Kegan skipped into my ironically bright pink room, half-laughing and half-asking for me to read him a picture book that told him that joy would last forever. And I had to smile to further make him believe it.

I'm a fucking bitch. I hate myself.

The worst of it was when the demons permeated the one true escape I've been left: sleep. When I was sleeping, I got to escape to a world of unbroken senselessness for a little while. The world is too cruel, but it can't get to me once I've swam away there, where I cannot drown in the pitch water. Only, the haunting memories have found ways to crawl into my utopia and make me look straight into their faces. They'd fill my whole being until I was finally granted the spontaneous tear of my eyelids, finding utmost relief in the stewed lace ceiling, proceeding to turn over and attempt to calm my beating, broken heart and coo myself assurance that it was "just a dream," though it is more of a mirror into the future.

That future isn't a mirror now, though. And it isn't even the future either.

I take a deep breath (the best I can breathe) and walk in through the door behind the upperclassmen. As I step onto the beige tile littered with pale blues and reds, everything inside me seems to tremble. It is like there is a major earthquake, but I'm the only one who can feel it. In a pathetic struggle to steady my body (or my mind- who the hell knows what I even am at this point?), I listen in on the conversation that the two immune, not messed-up girls are having in front of me. They're both at least five inches taller than I am, and they barely notice I even exist. At least it's not like in the movies I so stupidly saw as accurate depictions of high school when I was too young to even know there was a future beyond vanilla lip gloss and puppy stickers, when I saw television seniors (who were in their thirties) shove freshman boys into lockers and grab freshman girls by the ass (who were in their twenties). These girls can't be any older than seventeen.