asterismos; shelby

Three hundred and sixty-five.

Stooped in tragedy and sorrow I was, those three hundred and sixty-five days hanging over my head like the countdown to my own detonation. I was incinerated into the darkness that poured through the broken window, shards of glass sticking from its frame like the single blade driven into my sister’s eye.

(I’d run my palms across their uneven edges in the dead of night, when the slight stream of blood could not be seen, only felt).

In those hours of night I thought about nothing more than her, how the stars outside the broken window shined in glory of that which was lost—of that which never was. I tallied her loss in the numbers which spoke no meaning other than fact, nothing more than statistics which never dared to scratch the surface of her existence.

She was seventy-four days from nineteen—two hundred ninety-one days fallen from a grace she would never know. I scratched those days into the wall with broken glass and bleeding palms, tally marks upon the smooth skin of a house whose heart continued to beat despite the fact that the brilliant mind it once held had ceased with her cannon.

I still hear it in those early hours of morning, a wake-up call from the fits of sleep that plague my sanity like the unsolvable mysteries of a life she never lived plagued hers. And when the sheets seemed too heavy and the night air too thick I would stand at that broken window and believe the monsters that lived under the bed were not crawling from their place of comfort to grab at my ankles and whisper in my ear.

Sometimes they promised of hell’s return, but these never fazed me for I welcomed hell with open arms like my sister had once welcomed the darkness that shrouded her from a life she never wanted but I needed.

Other times, they’d take on the form of a voice I never wished to hear again—a whisper on the wind that chilled my body down to the bone, “I never loved you.”

I’d scream through that broken window as if the stars were my audience and one cry would bring about an end to it all, as if she’d be there to set a hand on my back and scare the monsters away—once upon a time my sister loved me.

(“I never did.”)

Once upon a time I believed the night had nothing to hold, but when night was the only time at which my mind refused to rest I would find the memories of my sister on the hammock outside our window, now torn to the ground by the shaking hands of a girl who never found her balance there.

She was one thousand seven hundred and seventy-six hours from nineteen—six thousand nine hundred and eighty-four from the crown that was to never grace her head.

Into the abyss my sister went— a darkness she could no longer love.

I had never been able to understand why my sister loved the night, for it was fear in the eyes of most, a terror of that which could not be known.

But the letters of the word uncertainty could be rearranged until they spelled Cha Leviane, definitions never straying from the syllable, no standard to be found among the eyes that spoke stars. She was light in my darkness, the opposite of that which she loved for a sister I was convinced she had a heart for.

When the monsters came out from the abyss to tap on my shoulder like the glass that carved my skin, I believed my sister to never be among them, a saving grace in a place where there was none to be found until that voice came one step too close, breathed on my neck with the heat of a thousand stars one second from their death— detonated into static sound she was, no longer seeped in existence.

Figuratively my sister lived; figuratively she died, never once the truth I searched for.

Still I had clung to her like the light that once streamed through that window when the sun came to chase the moon from the sky, yet now neither day nor night were much of any significance, the passing of time nothing more than a statistic that never managed to define existence.

That night when the sheets seemed too heavy and the air too thick, I crossed the room to the broken window, shards of glass threatening to carve my skin as I pushed my hand out into the chill of night, bones shaking and jaw locking as I kept my eyes trained upon the night sky. Broken hammock; broken heart, my sister was marked by the stars, those that lingered over my head and those that had detonated into death, alive to die and dead inside my sister was, seventy-four days from nineteen.

Hours were marked by sudden screams; minutes defined by how many seconds passed between each breath I took. Withdrawing from the window I sat with my back to those bloody walls, another tally finding its way to that at my back between the static and the cannon that sounded when my breathing became erratic.

My sister was one hundred and six thousand, five hundred and sixty minutes from nineteen—mere moments marked by chaos as she fell.

Infinite could be rearranged to spell Cha Leviane, you’d just have to take away those three hundred and sixty five days.