Margaret {d7/fin}

A heart of stone hangs heavy within my chest.

It does not beat anymore, not for my sister or father or even for myself. That rhythm stopped quite a time ago, when the world seemed lit by a light unexplained. It sat content above my sister and me, in a time when we functioned as partners rather than adversaries. There was no hatred to be found in our hearts of flesh, as we were consumed with love and compassion, self-sacrifice being a virtue we often expounded upon. But time ticked on, as it tends to do, and with it our hearts of gold faded to a substance worth less than nothing.

We were made of stone with a heart to match, each of our bodies threatening to crack and spill out what morals we still held dear, for each of these—love, compassion, honesty—they gained us little to none as days passed by.

And though rocks and minerals can attribute their wearing away to natural causes we could not do the same, and instead turned the blame upon our father (as we called him), or each other. It was a span of time dedicated to pointed fingers and dishonest blame, neither of us giving a second thought to where the real source lay.

(If our minds had ever been set in stone, now was certainly not the time in which it made itself known.)

Our father called us as different as night and day, but we were more similar than we cared to admit, both fueled by a drive for something we could not have (we did not need it, either). She wanted power and I wanted it to fall anywhere but her own selfish hands, without realizing that this aspiration made me just as dismal as her. She was a starless sky in the pitch black of night, and I was not the redeeming grace I believed myself to be.

For we were never the heroes told of in stories, and we never should have thought that this was so.

It was this foolish assumption that turned us against each other originally. Our father’s love was marked by favoritism and we played right along like chess pieces, moving in any way possible to overtake the other in hopes that a certain move would finally dethrone them. It never once crossed our minds that the real antagonist was neither of the two, and often her eyes locked upon my mind without hint of humanism behind them, and it was this dulled look of once-sharp insanity that laid hold in my mind and convinced me that any action I took against my sister was correct.

I was guarding the galaxy of my own mind, twisting cosmos upon themselves in hopes to protect what lay inside, even though the real danger never amassed on the front lines.

My father never cared for direct skirmishes anyway.

And so in our minds he planted the seed that we were indeed our own dangers, that we did more harm to the world than we did good, encouraging an internal conflict that began to show in sleepless nights and tired eyes. He told us that we were living in a shade of grey that caused him more annoyance than if we were completely in the wrong. He drilled it into our minds that our inconsistency was to blame for his problems—for not returning until the early hours of morning, for the broken bottles we stepped carefully to avoid, for the loss of a mother we never knew.

The stories he told us were never the fairy tales we believed them to be, only a world in which he wanted to remain stuck in, adding details that would seemingly make his existence worth something more.

He blamed us because he could not bear to blame himself.

Once upon a time, there was a family split in two, a loving father and mother raising girls who lived by their own accord. The ran a world of their own though they sat on opposite thrones, a girl who ruled with a wise mind of gold and the other with a fist as dark as night. They fought for their own good, calling it that of the world, and they never gave another thought to ruins they left behind. They spelt peace with the letters of war and equality with bloodshed, and never did they ever stop to consider the consequences. There was no happily ever after in this world, my dear girls, only a gory end in which I hope you never live to see.

And at the close of it all my sister would turn to face me and speak with an arrogant tone, reaffirming the fact that she was the one which fools called wise (though I never stopped to remind her of the irony in this). Regardless of the words my father used to describe her, and oh did they vary, mine never did.

Selfish.

Lost.

Stupid Mara, with eyes as dead as the animals on the sides of cracked paths, dismembered and left to rot. And though doors were shut in my face I never failed to hear what was spoken behind them, and though it should have evoked something—a thought or feeling at the least—it never did. My sister attributed this to my heat of stone, the same heart that beat no more, not for my sister or father or mother.

There was a biological state of life etched into my very being: fingers that never shook, even in the most intense of times; eyes that flickered only when a situation was dire; hair as bright as the blood that coursed through my veins; but there was never what my nonexistent mother would have called living.

No, a bullet wound or severed artery could not change my state of living, for I am already dead—in fact, I was never really alive.