A blonde head of hair, faceless parents, and a girl with hazelnut eyes looking over her shoulder at me. Looking back.
Then hands; hands from the walls, from the ground, gripping my limbs, ripping my clothes, scratching and tearing skin. Pinning me down.
I try to sing, try to hear the sound of my own voice, but he laughs. He laughs, and pushes me. I begin to cry, but I keep singing. I keep singing as he begins pushing me back and fourth, whispering how useless I am, how burdensome, how much of an inconvenience I am to the world. That it would be better off, less tangled and complicated if I was gone.
I stop singing. I only cry now, and he tells me people who cry are weak, he tells me that people who fall on their knees and beg for fathers who will never come are stupid, are ridiculous. Should die.
You should die, it chimes in with him, you want to die, don't you?
My worst tormentor merges with my worst fear, and suddenly I'm pinned on a bed, screaming pushing against a chest, against that same voice, which calls me disgusting names as he thrusts violently again and again—
I wake in a rush of breath.
Time is suspended in the air for a cold, isolated moment. And then time slips, crashing into me.
I sigh, and stretch out my leaden limbs to flick on the light switch. The burst of light makes a high pitched ringing sound in my ear, and I squint as it subsides. Now that my room is illuminated, thoughts rush in and out of my brain, uncontrollable, wild and ravaging.
The first time I dreamt like that, I sat in bed for an hour, believing it had happened. Sobbing silently so no one would hear, scratching my skin and ripping my hair out. Now I know how to tell the difference in between reality and my nightmares. But still, my skin feels invaded with handprints, my legs feel numb and untouchable, and I feel repulsive and dirty.
A drop of sweat runs down my neck and onto the fabric of my white camisole, and I notice how suffocating even the flimsy fabric feels, as I sit, hot and frozen under the heavy sheets. Broken.
This bed. I need to get out of this bed.
My legs don't feel mine as I kick off the covers and shift to climb down the ladder. As I descend, my alarm clock catches my eye. It's midnight.
"Midnight again," I breathe, running a hand through the damp roots of my hair. Not knowing what to do with my body, with my vision, I search my desk to find a hair band. My hand trembles slightly as I reach for my desk, and I try to control it as I pull my hair into a knot at the top of my head, a few strands escaping my shaking fingers.
I turn, back to my bed, unable to look at the sheets, at where I lay earlier and in my dream. But even as I attempt to shove them far away, the images come back, the pain in between my legs...
I do all I can to concentrate on the shapes of reality in my room, the bright light which blinds me after the killing dark. I rake my eyes over the wall in front of me, the balcony—
The balcony.
YOU ARE READING
Asunder
Teen Fiction"Promise me. Promise me you'll never beg someone to stay when they're already gone." Tangled up a million knots, Kingsley has lost faith in happiness. Her heavy heart struggles to continue to beat, and she is slowing down. It seems to her that the w...
