“I’m going to go and fuck a stranger,” She announced to him as she zipped up her all too familiar red dress, dabbed the red lipstick on. She looked into the mirror. “I’m going to fuck a stranger and not feel an inch of regret. I’m going to fuck him the whole night, and maybe in the morning too. If he tries to wake me with sweet kisses I’ll fuck that out of him too until he’s biting me bloody.”
He stared at his book and didn’t look up at all during the time of her getting ready and speaking. He was a statue, his ears did not work, he couldn’t hear a word. She knew that’s all lies. “Do you understand me? Do you know why I’m doing this? I’ll probably do it again tomorrow. Do you understand? You do not own me. At all. Any part of me. Not my body, not my heart. There is no part of me that is yours, No terrors of the world that will make me wish to be in your arms. I will never sit and wait for you to come home and fix you dinner and ask about your day. I will never love you. I will never take care of you. You will never own me, at all, ever.”
That’s as good of a goodbye she ever gave. As she walked out the door, he glanced up. It was customary, something familiar in their relationship. Always look up at the last second, do not give in before. The red dress flew past his vision like a hummingbird. The same red dress she wore when they met. She wore that one on purpose.
He opened up his book and continued reading.
There are different people in the world. There are the people that believe that everyone has good within them. They’re the ones with their heads on the chopping block first, their trust and hope giving them their own death sentence. There are those that think there is a fine, definitive line between good and bad that people walk upon and go one way or the other. They’re the ones that that try to find a reason within everything, to a point of becoming blind to everything else. There are the people who believe there is no such thing as villains, that everything is up to circumstance. They’re the ones that try to find a reason for anything and everything, looking over gaps and gaps of consequence just to be able to get the reasoning. And then there are people that believe that there is no such thing as someone who isn’t a villain. That in the end, every person is a villain in some other person’s life, and there is no escaping the evils of self and the world.
Now I don’t know where you stand amongst this all. I see your heartache and I think you’re trying too hard with the reasons of people. I don’t know exactly where you stand in thought, but I know where I do. I know that I believe everyone to be a villain. Including myself. It’s a lot easier to get sleep at night, knowing and accepting the evil in the world, not trying to fight it away.
The crown sits atop his head, but it seems more like a cage. It’s heavy and weighted, and he slouches a bit when it is put upon him. He feels the weight that it means to portray. It encases him. Paralyzes him with power. A crown they say, a crown for a king, but all I can see is a cage for a prisoner. He will never be his own man ever again.
And that was quite sad.
The Great Depression of my time is Me. The building around me crumbles. I am the architect of my own tragedy, I wrote in this downfall myself. This will change me, and it won’t be for the better. It will haunt me for years, like a ghost of my own self.
Within me a dead romantic lives. It sings for a life it yearns for, built in the clouds of song and of dreams. She used to scream and she used to yell, but now she merely whispers. Each beat of my heart was a hidden beat of her song, which has become untranslatable over the years. And when this dead romantic first lived, way back when I was young, she thought that her voice would only get fuller as the years went on. And how surprised was she the day she found her voice almost soundless. And how surprised was I the day when a heart beat just meant I was alive. There was no music, no yearn for a song, to be found within the thumps. A heartbeat became a heartbeat, and the dead romantic was dead.
The two syllables echoed in my head; a reminder, a mantra. Personified by the clicking and clacking of my soiled boots against the ground; heel-toe, heel-toe. E-nough. E-nough. The first syllable, one letter, stretched out, and swung into the second. They fit together comfortably, smooth in juxtaposition to the cold and quick click and clack of my heel-toe, heel-toe. E-nough, e-nough. A reminder, a mantra on the windy cold walk back. A word to overcome, a word to destroy me.
The wind was blowing fiercer than usual. She stood amongst the wreckage and blood, a lone survivor in this last battle. That didn’t mean she was a fierce warrior, and she sure as hell didn’t feel like one. All she could feel was the sadness and emptiness in her heart for her people, and the blood pumping in her veins. Blood surrounded her, the exact blood that the pages of history would be written in.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, she thinks as she looks away. It started with others, with lies. But we were always supposed to stay honest and true.
“And we did,” she told the dead body of her enemy as she clenched her knife. The fact of the matter is her people did stay loyal, just as they have been for years upon years. One little untruth - could it even be called a lie? - was whispered by a stranger into an ear, and suspicion turned to bloodshed.
My world was built in shadows, and destroyed in a whisper of blood. She turned away and ran back to what was left of her home.
Your body is an echo amongst this vast landscape. Each beat of my heart makes you disappear more and more. I can’t take it. This foreign land is a vacuum, and everything within it is consumed. Your body’s landscape, replaced with this one. This one, an echo of what you were. Everything here is an echo of an echo, dissolving into a fogged nothingness. The same is for me as well. My heart is still beating, but it’s growing fainter. This place is consuming me as well. Soon there will be nothing left of us, the way it should have been.
And this I promise unto you, with my final dying breath: I will haunt you until you breathe yours, and then forever more. You have never left my mind, so now I shall never leave your presence. And when death does finally decide to reveal hisself to you, it will be my eyes that stare at your blank glossed over ones. Then unto your death I shall haunt you there as well. I lost my life for my love of you, now lose your peace of mind for my obsession of you.
PART III, IV. {EXCERPT}
I got stronger every day as well. The further I got, the more I felt my real, old self returning. Only, not exactly my old self. Not really.
I looked all around me and looked for the magic of the forest. The first day I couldn’t feel it, I decided that the effects of collecting were still taking their toll on me. The fourth day I couldn’t feel it, I wondered if maybe these forests were not magical, like the forests by my cabin.
By the tenth day, I realized that it wasn’t the forests that changed, but rather me. Being collected changed something within me. I used to see such life and wonder all around me. I used to feast on all of the colors surrounding me: vivid greens and deep reds and golden yellows. I used to find beauty in all.
But winter was coming, and so was the winter of my life, it seemed. I was no longer a child of summer, but a woman of winter. Winter took away the false flashing colors. Winter killed off anything that wasn’t strong enough. Winter covered everything in a purifying blanket of white. It got rid of the lies that summer whispered in your ear. And if you didn’t change along with it, well, you’d be ridden of as well.
