you still have c h a o s in yourselves / pillow.

Loose canon: a label etched across my chest with my own trembling hands, stinging skin justification as to why there's a brick in my palm, arm arched back, taking aim, fire --

Explosion, glass shatters, raining down on the concrete I stand on - I envy it. Sweater wrapped around bruised fists and I punch out the remaining glass, watching it slide to the ground below me. With a drum in my head playing the beat of a frantic pulse I haul myself over the windowsill and land, feet first, with a thud in no-mans land.

Eden Institute: for proper and patient girls who paint their faces and purse their lips and turn their noses up at girls like me. Who'd run to their teachers, their parents, their friends and spit acid when my name hits their tongues. I spit blood on their shiny shoes, break their noses with a flying fist, kick and scream as someone bigger and taller than I wraps me up in their arms and throws my body over their shoulder - I hit the ground, hard, still screaming as the wind is knocked from my lungs.

Like a ghost town I fall comfortably into their absence, feet settling in to a slow rhythm along with the beat of my heart as evidence of my trespass bounces quietly off of the walls. No alarm bells, no sirens or spotlights or angry arms to drag me away. I start to think that perhaps the most treasured possession this building holds is not its security, but its students.

There's a thunder in my chest and it brews, steady and silent, as I make my way through the strange halls - objective lost in my waves of curiosity. Panels of glass slit through closed doors reveal desks and chairs and marble slabs, ghosts of students and their being here found in open lockers and pushed-out chairs and scuff marks on the floor. I create my own, shoes dragging across the floor, eyes drinking in the life of someone better off than I.

Kicking over a chair, racing up staircases with furious steps, a rage boils in the thunderstorm within me - its cause unknown, but it feels like jealousy. Unfamiliar walls close in around my body and I bolt upwards two steps at a time, legs screaming, heart racing, fists clenched with the need to hurt, to shout, to scream - 

I collide with the image of a girl in my vision and my eyes tunnel in on her. She's got a cigarette between her fingers and her hair is the colour of the sky behind her - endless midnight black, and the idea of infinity warps my concentration and pushes back the walls of the privileged threatening to consume me.

Loneliness abolished, I panic at her existence and freeze, trapped in the vision of a stranger and the wafts of smoke exhaled from her lungs.

She fills mine.