❝dig your anchors in my bones,
keep your breathing soft and slow.❞
❘❘
I CRASH ON THE BATHROOM FLOOR, fría y sola.
When I stumbled into Julian's apartment, hands shaking and head throbbing, there was no one. Still choking on an endless sob, still clawing out of my skin, still somehow fighting at the edge of a comedown, I scrubbed myself raw in somebody else's shower. No era mía.
Nada era realmente mío.
And when things started to blur and blacken, and when things started to bend and break, and when things started to burn, I went down with it. My knees buckled as I left the shower, colliding with the cold, cold, cold tiles, bones and teeth rattling with the impact of a million storms.
Like snowflakes... fluttering in my lashes... like ice... swimming in my veins...
ICE
It flashes by me violently—a drifting, distant promise, a warning, wild and destructive, lacing around my heart with the underlying truth of a twisting, tumultuous threat.
Lost somewhere between those big, white letters, in the spaces between, in the darkness, the shadow looms para siempre, reminding us in a perfectly constructed deception that we're simply casualties of war.
Guerras fronterizas.
Another silent sob shakes my shoulders, tearing me from the blinding white moments and the dark dreams of desperation. My heart wrenches into my throat.
Everything around me shakes, tumbling and crumbling and— and I'm falling, and I'm trembling— and I'm gasping for air— and there are so many emotions ripping through my chest, like fragile fucking fabrications of a future.
Everything hurts.
There is some tangible line between tender palms and the taste of gravel, a conscious level of the current catastrophe sinking into my skin. The drunken dizziness doesn't anchor me; it only bleeds into a delirious daze of memories, intertwining and splitting... ripping at seams that have been stitched together for years...
ICE
... a shadow through tinted windows, gritando y llorando, white vans stealing soft whispers and smiles...
ICE
... a muffled sob, a desperate plea, like hot gravel, scraped knees, dedos y uñas...
ICE
... a distant phone call, a crashing weight, crashing, crashing, crashing...
...a half-hearted hope for it to stop hurting.
When I stand, the world tilts, and when I move, the world reels around me. I blink, bones aching and vision dimming, I blink, and I'm staggering, swaying, swimming through wooden floors and cracked doorways. I'm sniffing.
There are shards of the night that don't exist, drowned out by hazy darkness and cut, cut, cut into a soft, sensual snowstorm.
It's uncut, unfiltered, unbelievable pain.
Somehow, I end up in my car, crouched in the driver's seat, shaking and sweating and just sobbing. With raw needs and an empty stomach that just won't stop rolling, I sink and sink and sink. Space seems to twist around me, spiraling with every shadow that passes the car through the night, through hours or minutes or seconds.
YOU ARE READING
Snow
RomanceWhen Neva Álvarez moves to Queens, she's merely biding her time between bartending and dodging her brother's phone calls before her final year at NYU, and with the summer dwindling to an end, it's difficult not to find herself drawn to her new next...
