zinkles
The sun rises in the east, but with every bit of daylight filtering itself through my single, curtain laden window, I can feel my stomach flipping itself over and over. I just want to push the sun back beneath the dark blanket of stars and clouds and chain it there forever. Today, as I've sprawled myself across my bed, watching the bright red numbers tick to six thirty, I've decided that I hate the sun, with all of my might, and it should just shove itself back into the eastern horizon and drown itself in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, where nobody can see it.
My mind is wilting from the image of your face, your rotten face, blankly staring ahead. The twisted, intelligent mush of my brain has tangled itself into a mess I can't be bothered to clean up. Pink strings are knotted in my head, and my tongue's tied halfway down my throat, and my hearts climbing it's way up, desperately clawing it's way towards the roof of my mouth to see the ugly truth and make sure that it's real, that it's true.
And your face.
Your face.
Your face is so sad, your eyes have lost their sparkle of life.
And your mouth.
It's set into a line, so neutral, unlike the happy person I once knew.
And as time goes on and the flowers in my hands wilt with the force of time and sadness, my heart slides sullenly back to where it belongs, and that's where the tears start.
He names his son after his best friend.
His dead best friend.
He doesn't know why, doesn't know how, but his first son's name ends up being his best friend's name, same spelling and all. He doesn't know how his wife agreed, doesn't even know why his wife would nod her head at the sudden suggestion, but it still ends up being the syllables spoken out of his mouth on impulse.
And as his son grows older and they have more children, his first son reminds him of his best friend and it tears his heart to shreds and stitches his old, untreated wounds with the gentlest of care. His smile, his laugh, his attitude reminds him of his best friend so much that he wants to scream and cry and laugh and hug his son into suffocation. It's endearingly painful.
So when his son asks him how he got his name (for a school project, how troublesome), he sits the young boy down, balls his hands into fists, and relays a story he's sure his son will never forget.
And he doesn't.
And when he has a family of his own, he names his son after his dad's best friend, not after himself. No reason to call his son the second, or junior.
(Only on the legal papers.)
The tradition lives on, and the man with the best friend who died too early for his own good died a very happy man.
Yes, very happy indeed.
All her life she's been searching for something worthwhile, something that's completely worth the suffering and sadness and the tears and the blood and the pain. She's been searching for it for so long, but when she sees him smile, when she hears his laugh, when she feels his hand on hers, she knows that everything she did wasn't a waste. The searching is done when she feels his lips on hers, her anxiety is mellowed down when he holds her and she holds him, and she comes to one conclusion.
He is worthwhile.
He works his hardest to take himself away from the things that remind him of them, the things that strike the fondest memories locked deep away in his heart that he can't seem to get rid of. He fasts off of frosted cookies and magnolias because those were their favorite, those were their absolute favorite, and he knows that if he takes one bite or takes one sniff, he'll instantly flash back to the blissful time that he called his life before everything came crashing down, down, down to the ground.
A rally of sobs is all he hears. A rally of sniffles and voices that hurt, hurt a whole lot. And if he listens hard enough, he swears he can hear his love weeping in the back, but it's impossible, because his love is dead, dead, and dead.
He turns his head and listens, listens, listens for their voice, but it's not there, not there at all.
His cries are the loudest, the most agonizing to hear.
He is the vapor on my skin, the vapor rising up from the ground and the bodies decay, vaporizing into nothing. He is the ghost of a touch on my arm, the wind in my hair when I run, when I run far, far away from the place where hell came crashing down. He is the vapor in the air that I breathe, the molecules of dust and dirt my lungs must filter out and expel as I heave and stumble over myself, over my feelings, over my missing heart as I realize, he's vaporizing away, and there's absolutely nothing I can do.
The smoke's rising up, rising up and up and up and up, and he can't take it. It's hot, filling his nose with the dank scent of death. His vision is skewed, and there's no way out. Like vapor, filling his lungs until it all goes for naught, bringing him closer to death and letting him waste precious seconds of the time he has to be alive, time that might run out soon, and he's not aware of it.
The vapor's in his face, and it's cloying with hurt.
I've been stapled, stapled over and over. Reused to the point of no return. Torn to shreds and glued back together again, over and over. Over and over until I'm not sure what I was to begin with, all I know is that I'm far from what I was before. Stapled and torn, glued and taped. Stapled to the dingy streets where I grew up, torn down, glued, and stapled once more in a place where everything moves too fast and everything whirs far too loud.
Stapled pictures to corked walls. Pictures that mean nothing. Pictures that are nothing. Pictures that will go to waste and will end up in a recycling bin and become one of those stupid layered pencils.
Stapled, not stable. When you're stapled you're stuck, when you're stable you're ready, ready for anything and everything. When you're stapled, you're forced. Forced to do this, do that. Just like those meaningless pictures until you're torn down when the year ends and you're put in the waste bin, put into recycling to become something that you're not.
And it's painful.
Being stapled.
writing since 2013 · 11 entries · 9 days shown up
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