spencer st. claire / d5 / cb (fin)

i. After everything catches stagnant, one’s forced to sluggishly adapt—to the heavy air, to rotten scotches discarded in a flooded basin, to truths veiled beneath an unspoken conversation. This heap of decay belongs to my ancestors, mother, father, descendants. It’s a contagious disaster laced to genetics, a bushfire I can’t extinguish as I would a flare.

ii. I never went ghost-hunting or spat over the grimy pavement, never lived through something, only nothing, never set foot inside a run-down tenement. My parents detached me from children who were rough, who leapt over seams, a bulk of glistening muscles. A rusted silver platter and spoon; Keaton and Abe St. Claire’s cocooned what they drunkenly mistook as ‘golden’ in counterfeit grandiosity. I was never as precious as gold. These bones were something inchoate and arboreal, like the greenness of leaves in spring, only grieving for a distant freedom.

iii. But dear father and mother, the blame isn’t yours to carry nor mine. Let’s set down the world from our calloused shoulders for a moment, sing a hymn, and break bread. We have enough exhaustion to last us many existences; this is a brief recess we’re worthy of.

iv. One step ahead, thought, doubt, paranoia, a racing heart in between bruised ribs, paralytic fear, a broken lisp, retreat back. It’s cyclic, a routine, a loop I am ensnared by. That’s social anxiety, said nonchalantly the school therapist they entrusted my skull to. Social anxiety housed by the delicate bones of a mosaicked boy who’d always had private lessons at school, always peered at his peers from afar, always kept behind a looking glass—that has a satirical grain to it.