persia keeni} fin {district six

She finds cracks beneath every surface. In the walls of her house, in algorithms and equations, in her own flaws. Lipstick stains and bittersweet in-between her teeth. The death that creeps in the crevices of her home, floorboards creaking with the weight of the memories they hold. She thinks her skull creaks too, plagued with equations that are scattered across pages in loopy numbers and scrawled letters. There's too much to write and her mind gets ahead of her hands. Hands that might have the energy to brush down mattered hair, were they not enraptured with tilting up bottles or writing down solutions. (Say anything about her appearance, though, and she'd give you a look that'd make your cold, dead corpse hit the floor if they could kill. She's got that kind of glare that would lead her to throw a full-grown man across a room, had she the capacity to do so. She asks who else dares to assume that she's sitting at a bar before shagging about with no words at all. Silence follows. Nobody dares to question it.)

There's cracks in her bones she (or rather, nobody else) has ever bother to attend to. They rattle, shake, keep her up at night. Fingernails bleed crimson when teeth gnaw them down just that bit further and they've barely time to grow before meeting their maker once again. In her brain, crevices grow. She can taste the emptiness from the inside-out.

Oh, and the alcohol too. She practically chokes on that, thumping at the back of her throat like a heartbeat.

(At sixteen years old she spent the entire night close to vomiting an empty stomach and she vowed never again, never again.

Pyrian and Gypsy fell behind the television screen six days later. Never again, never again.

"Willis Keeni!" proved her wrong.

So did the call of the night three weeks later.)

Bad habits crawl through her persona. (Liquor-lips spill liquid lies, fingers bleed and siblings die.)  Bullshit is shoved to the side and stomped underneath the souls of her shoes before it can come anywhere close to smacking her in the face, but she mastered that skill long before her family members were snatched up one-by-one. She thought she wouldn't miss them, there's too many children inside of this house to know who's here and who's not. An emptiness that at fourteen she thought was teenage angst began to creep back into her system - only this time it had a name:

Addiction. 

Rooms began to empty, voices became quieter. No more children appeared at breakfast. She's heard them whisper as they walk past her home, peer up at the windows as their fingers claw around the  rusted wire fencing. "You'll die in there" they tremble. She scoffs, kicks them out of the way, sends them running with a glare through coal-stained glasses she paints on every morning.

Enslaved to rumour, enslaved to a continuous ache, filling herself up with reasons to everything that happens. There's a reason she was born (lack of protection, alcohol, an accident, all of the above) and a reason she is so lonely (a house full of screaming children and a short temper) and a reason to why she burns so easily in the sun (genetics, lack of sunscreen, pigmentation, ozone). You are born, and then you die, and it all makes sense on paper. There is no room for wishing, or hoping, or happily-(n)ever-afters. She learnt that long before she knew how to speak.

She never wished for an imaginary father to come and whisk her away. She was quite alright with her own little corner of the house. Attics promise friends with eight legs and places too high up for little hands and feet to crawl into. Raising herself was bad enough and she'd scrub the house from top to bottom with her own damn toothbrush before she was going to raise any of her younger siblings for her mother. There is no thumping above her head when she tries to sleep and nightmares don't dare disturb her in the night. (They say she is the nightmare that wanders through the house when nobody is looking, but she thinks that the night is beautiful and alive and she sleeps through the day and its turmoil.)

There are memories of a small girl up here, traces of a girl that once believed not in the love of parents but an unattainable fiction spun together by those who yearned for false hope. It is a love she is terrified of, a love that can sink. A love that wove stories with their tongues, a love that breathed lies down her throat. A love that traced her fingers gently, hammered against her ears, sold her into something she thought that she needed. (She won't let herself yearn like that. Not anymore.) Because she promised, you see. Never again, never again, never again.

And everyone she could have perhaps ever had a hope of loving leaves.

Over, and over, and over again.

(It's easier to swallow at 4am.)