Rift Walkers

Normal

    The television flickers and fades out of the darkness that looms over my room. I couldn't help but notice that the single heartbeat that resides in this place is only ever me.

I don't have much confidence in others. I let actions speak to me more than their pathetic words do. Before I even let myself think of others, I always dwell on myself. Even if someone's actions has nothing to do with me, I always wonder as to how that makes me in the situation stand.

A man at the age of twenty with a disheveled complexion witnessing his own girlfriend cheat on him with his best friend actually made him dumb founded.
They pull away from one another when I enter their space.

I felt like a person in a crowd witnessing the death of someone on a street. But I was the one that was affected directly, like I was related to the corpse on the road.
I was in fact the boyfriend of this girl. My emotions were supposed to be pouring from yet they didn't. I couldn't find any in the present moment.

It was until the static of my television that tuned into my ears made me look to my lap as I grab my ears to cover the bees that buzz in the white noise. I turn my television off.
I pull my hands down from my ears to see and feel them shake.

They were shaking ever since earlier today. When I saw the fictional body on the road. My mind made me inspect it myself. This body was me, the embodiment of my emotions that I couldn't find; lying before me. It's neck snapped and limbs in the ways they shouldn't bend. In the middle of the road where cars roll over it. It was nothing in the eyes of everyone.

From what is reality and what is fiction, I can't ever get a grasp. That's the one thing I know as my hands shake against me.

Something begins in my throat, a dry and heavy feeling. My lips quiver. I thought I had control over my mind but I was never the ruler. It was ruling over me.
It kept replaying how they were with one another; smiling, content, just before I walked into the room to witness the affair.

In that moment, even though my mind was thinking of many things before, it was silent and the same feeling in my throat bubbled up.

I left the building. My girlfriend, or ex, trailed after me, yelling my name.

"Joel!" Her voice was always so frail, even when she would yell. This time it was on ice, like she would slip any moment in a waterfall of tears.

My hands shake. My throat is dry. My eyes meet the loud streets of Seattle. Cars fly by me as she catches up to me.
I always hated the heart of the city. This place. His house.

I couldn't look her in the eye. My head is straight forward while her eyes bear into the side of my face.

She stands in silence. I was unaware at the moment that she had been crying. It was until she ripped my hand from my side, pulling me down, into a kiss amongst her lips. The sent of him filled my nostrils. Any sense of giving in evaporated in a moments notice.
I pulled away immediately. I was responsive. She was testing me.

"I love you!" She begs, "I love you and only you!"
I didn't think I could look at her until I saw the tears fall off the frame of her face. I did. Her sickly complexion had always supported mine. We wear baggy dark clothes with greasy hair. In that moment, I knew that was something I had to say goodbye to. Rather than having it as a fashion sense and a quirk of our relationship, it would now just be a bad hygienic habit.

Her features fell. She kept crying. She began hitting me against my chest, shoving me away.

"Why won't you say it back!"
She hit.
"Say it!"
She spat and slammed her palms against me before I was a few feet away from her.
I didn't shed a tear. I knew she had been searching in my eyes. I didn't give her anything just like she gave me nothing in that moment other than pathetic words that meant nothing.

Words are a facade of pain that is only truly shown through actions. I keep that close to my heart.

She finally let go of her fists that hold at her side. We meet eyes one more time.

I say something. I didn't know I had it in me.

"You were never happy with me, Hannah."
I smiled.
She weeped.
I looked away.

My figurative body was no longer there in the road.

My eyes tried to come back to her but she was gone.

Hours rest upon my eyelids, heavy and unbearable. I didn't mind it. It was a familiar feeling.
Everything was normal.
I lean against my couch. Grabbing for a smoke but wasn't this hard before.

I observe the packaging and trace my fingers around it before opening it. My throat stems into a desert like heat.
My heart sank.

Who am I kidding. Nothing is normal.

My mind imagines her lips which met the bud of these cigs. Her greasy hair would hint at the light when it flashed from her lighter.
I always watched her, the second to light my own cigarette.

My fingers have a tremor when I touch the cigs. I gasp silently. My hair falls past my face as I lean down, not to pick them up but to hug myself. My ass meets my dusty floor. I hold myself, remembering every detail of her.

My eyes clench. My fingers grip my sides while my knees hug close to me. I haven't cried in years, but now, it seems reasonable.
I thought my neighbors could hear me so I hold my mouth in hesitation as if I am to yell at the world. Yell for what I had lost. I bite my hand. I genuinely cried for everything. My words that never meet anyone. I couldn't reach, not even towards my own girlfriend of two years.

She cheated on me with my best friend, a man clearly more acceptable. His riches were given to him from the family that he never wanted and travels the world. He would be able to supply the college that she had been going to ever since our graduation. They both hate their families. They both were in the same graduation class, me being a year below them. They always hung around one another.

I wonder how long they had been together. She lead me on. For two years. To keep me around and to use me for something that he couldn't give. But that is where that thought ends. He could give her everything. She doesn't need me.

And to that thought pattern, only led to more unwanted and unfamiliar tears.

I lie on my side, my limbs sprawled against the carpet.

Loneliness was something normal. A common friend. This was usually the point in the grieving process where you would plead to a god or a higher entity.

I wonder if she ever felt that need to plead to a divine force to fix something that crumbled so perfectly before her.
She's as atheist as it gets, me included.

Instead begging she would sit back and smoke. That was her god, an addiction.

I am nothing without her.

Gods can't even help me now.