Madness.

15.

Plain white hospital ceilings remind me too much of my childhood and the horrors that came with it. I'd been here too many times, fought for life one time too many. Kissed the honeyed lips of death and hoped to die a thousand times. I was born dying, with a cord around my throat that should have killed me. But somehow, I'd survived. It seemed back then that I refused to die before I got the chance to breathe, to live. Now that I am here again, I find myself searching for who was I before my life had become this way? Who had I once been? Who had I once known? Had I still been myself the first time I lay in a much smaller hospital bed.

3 days had I lay here. Pressed up against this cold, thin plastic mattress. The sterilised air had embedded itself into my skin until I lost every trace of what came before. I feel like a piece of wood, surrounded by blankets, made out to be human - something it wasn't. Something it would never be. 

I wondered why I was still here, it's not like I still cared for my recovery. It's not like I could get better. Maybe the bruising on my lungs would fade away, but in the end, I would still be me. I'd still want to die, my position hadn't changed.

Maybe I was happy, watching my choices infringe on their sanity. I'd always wanted to see my sister fumble with herself. I'd wondered if my death would damage her perfect facade and now know I knew that my death would crush her. Should I be blamed for wanting her broken? Perhaps in breaking her we'll become less different and maybe then my parents would accept the possibility that maybe, maybe they'd been the problem.  Maybe I was only ever destined to die because I had been placed in their palms only to be crushed within them.

I think perhaps; I had once been admirable. Enviable, even. Once I had been a beautiful girl with a future carved out of solid gold, I'd done trivial things and bumped elbows with politicians and doctors and famed glorified artists. What was there to envy now? What was left of me would barely suffice as a shadow of my former shadow. 

Or perhaps what was left of me was more real than I had ever been before. That scared me. The idea that I have never truly ever been better than the crumbling chaos of my life. Of my mind. That this is all I have really ever been, a plate sitting at a table's edge with every intention of falling and smashing into too many pieces to even consider keeping it. When things can't be fixed, it's our job to throw them out. They no longer have purpose and the most they might do is hurt someone along the line.

The doctor asked me to be more careful next time as if he believed I wouldn't purposefully put myself in that position. A rich and pretty young girl like me had so much to live for, he said. I had the entire world ahead of me; he said. He was a nice old man, but he was bold to assume I valued my life so much. Bold to assume I cared enough to hold on. I did care about one thing, though. Something that had been biting the side of my neck about this whole, dying thing. Blue. He was slowly becoming a leech at my side, he had literally barely left the side of my bed; he never left unless I asked him to. And even then he was back in the seat beside me before I could say a word. He was dedicated, something that wasn't foreign to him. But the more time he spent in that seat, the more his eyes began to seem like his own again. And the more I see him. Truly see him; not as a stand-in for the romance that I'd once had with Arthur but simply as Carter. My Blue.

He's looking at me now. And I'm looking back at him, wondering how long before I drowned within his gaze. I seem to have forgotten the function of oxygen, my brain runs on the tired smile he offers me. The feeling of his warm hand as he reaches out and touches me makes me sane. My heart feels like a meteor raging through a starless sky. And for a moment, I am unsettled. Torn between the feeling of his skin against mine and the crashing of waves that call me. This hadn't been part of the deal.