Post by ines izar d11a 🖤 cait on Apr 23, 2015 6:22:49 GMT -5
december donner
They returned him to us as a box of bones, the last of a life sheltered in secrets captured in the hollows of eyes I couldn’t bring myself to look into. We’d seen it coming. Another loss of brother we barely knew, and from twelve to four to three, we quietly retired to empty bedrooms to collect the tears we’d been saving for goodbye, goodbye, g o o d b y e.
I’m not weak I’m not weak I’m not weak I promise you I’m not weak
Etchings, carved into plaster-wood. There’s a collage of scrawled desperations above my bed, for I was never brave enough to slice the hoarse words into my skin. Never brave enough for any act of courage that didn’t jeopardise something I didn’t deserve: life. Prickling my soles, the earth is ice, urging me forward when I’m stuck on the edge of a cliff and escape is only a waltz away.
It’s why I run. The heavy steps in walking thin lines are a burden – running is thoughtless, free. I’m left with butterflies in my stomach, in my mind, in my palms and fingertips and their beating wings cloud out that which is Marc’s voice, Marc’s kills, Marc’s collapsing on a tinny TV screen.
I stole a name when I wasn’t a thief with an unspoken right to all out of my reach. December Donner, it wasn’t enough of a homecoming. December Donner, and it almost feels like a new start, albeit one that ends in tragedy all the same. Some things we cannot change.
Some things make us stronger.
Some things are more right than we can ever understand them to be, and running under a new pretence down deserted streets more familiar than my heart can handle is l i g h t. Memories blur with the motion of the breathing ocean, removing the red from his hands that are my hands, staining my eyes grey with sidewalk souls. Back to unfamiliar familiarity; back to familiar unfamiliarity.
It’s more home than I think our battered recluse can ever be to me, now.
I carry him with all our other losses, mothers and fathers, surnames and more abandoned homes than I count. I deserve nothing less, cannons in the wind and they’re right again, again, pounding on the doors of a splintered landscape. I can’t let them in; I’m too short to reach the locking latch, too tired to argue insanity, too w e a k to stand on my own.
So I fall.
At first, it’s a blink of dust caught between my eyelid. A huddle of bones, dirt-caked fingernails raking the pavement that bleeds melancholy, but even tiny particles of matter come to settle in the recoiling bitumen with time. The streets are dead, too much death, but the stories still linger in the air long after the footsteps of our ghosts have receded. There’s quiet. Teasing eyes raking over my body, drinking the desperation hanging from my t-shirt. Two eyes flocked by wayward strands of hair – something out of a nightmare and you can’t pull away. From across a street, two sides of the sidewalk, two hearts beating to their own drums, and perhaps those rhythms are not so different.
In another life, she could be pretty. In another change of fate, a reversal of positions, it could be me living out of retired cloth and deserted streets. It could be her filling empty parts of a deranged soul with faces of the lost, names of the dead. Her, with a displaced home and stifling corridors to run through, with a washed face and tired eyes encrusted with nothing more than last night’s tears, because the bad comes with the good, heaven knows I don’t deserve the positives.
‘I–’
Wretched croaks from a parched throat, and we’ll try again, again – ‘I don’t think I belong here,’ – because I refuse to be weak. Because there is no other option in a merciless world.
Optimism is a fairytale Ary used to weave before she was stolen from us a final time. It was easy to let go of her, of all of them and all of their bedtime fables. Abandonment never leaves the heart of the pessimist, but that was Nieve.
We try again, again – ‘It’s hard, to feel like you belong, somewhere,’ – because we all move on, Donner, a summoning of names I won’t hide from any longer.
