into your {g r a v i t y} :: dahlia

this is for the girl next door who thinks she knows me
she adores the way my words
feel just like home, but she don't know
the sadness flow that pours out nightly
still, i keep rolling the lonesome road out before me

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three weeks, one day, twenty hours, sixteen minutes
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Hi, I'm Kaelen Dempsey, and I've killed everything I ever loved.

Maybe not in the literal sense, because I've only ever loved one person and I know that he's still breathing, can hear the echo of his heartbeat pounding against the inside of my head when the night gets quiet. I don't really sleep anymore (my sheets still smell like him and I haven't had the willpower to sleep in my room in weeks, let alone wash them and forever lose the scent of sunshine and a home I've never known), mostly just wander around the house like the ghost I've become, sometimes play Mom's piano just so all of the silence can't converge and weigh on the hollow cavern of my chest until I feel like my veins are full of lead.

A steaming portion of crippling loss will do wonders for clearing up the way one sees the world, and the past unbearable weeks have shown me this much - I was never the all-powerful god of righteousness I claimed to be. I'm just a scared little boy with a handful of cyanide and self-deceit. I spent my whole life fighting the monsters in my closet - and of course irony would have it that one of those monsters I was fighting was the closet itself - but that never really made me any less frightened of them. And now that I've admitted to myself that the phantoms of my past have the power to knock me off balance, they're all coming out to play, especially the most recent one.

Colt is everywhere even though it feels like his absence is crushing me. I don't really have time to ponder this paradox through the agony of the crippling, invisible hole that's been punched through my chest, but I see the evidence of it even when I don't want to. When I wake up from my first hour or so of sleep in however many days, brought on more by physical exhaustion and caffeine crashes than the desire to be in an unconscious state (to sleep is to dream and to dream is to dream of him, of his laugh, of his smile, of the the malice in his eyes when he screamed that he hated me), it's the first thing I notice.

I wake up on the couch. Must have crashed there last night sometime. I can see down the hall and into the open door of my bedroom from here. He's still there in the little things he left behind, tiny little needles that prod at my soul every time I start to think I'm doing better. An old Hemingway novel laying open on the end table on his side of the bed. A half-empty carton of smokes and an ash tray on mine, the stubs of our last post-coital cigarettes perched precariously on the edge. I breathe out shakily and try to fight off the hysteria that's been coming at a moment's notice lately, my emotional state much more volatile than it might be seeing as I'm not used to having emotions.

Baby steps, Kae, baby steps. Get up from the couch and try to ignore the creaky ache in my bones from lying there in grief-paralysis for too long. Walk down the hallway, edge into the bedroom. Breathe through my mouth so I don't have to smell him in the rumpled blankets. Walk over, slowly sit on the edge of the bed. Trace the spot on the pillow where his head would be.

Don't cry. Don't cry.

My imagination has always been overactive, and although I try to keep the fantasy from forming, it takes hold - how in some brighter, ideal existence this is our house, and I just walked into our bedroom and he's still asleep in our bed. Curled up next to the empty space, his skin warm, him stirring when I touch him, complaining that my hands are cold and I need to shave and leave me alone, dammit, five more minutes Kae, just five, but I kiss his shoulder-neck-cheek anyway, good morning, good morning, I love you, good morning, and he grumbles but smiles, turns his head to press his lips to mine. That could have happened. That wonderful caricature of intimacy could have been us. I fucking offered. I offered him forever.

And he said no.

With that stupid daydream it's all too much to bear, and I'm choking on what feels like my heart trying to crawl up out of my throat so it doesn't have to stay where it hurts so much anymore. I've probably cried more in the past few weeks than most lovelorn teenage girls will in their miserable lives; cried until my breath hitched and I got dizzy from the lack of oxygen, cried until my head pounded with enough force I thought it would explode, cried until my body revolted against the tears and I got physically ill. All it does is hurt, all the way down to the center of me, like my soul's been flayed alive and left to wither. I've always been a stubborn bastard but there's only so much a person can take, and I've grown so tired of hurting.

Drinking twenty or so cups of coffee a day does weird things to your perception of time. One second, I'm curled in on myself, sobbing like my world is falling, and the next I'm suddenly burrowed under the covers, pressing the sheets to my nose and trying to remember a time when the scent clinging to them meant home instead of hurt. I think I try to stay awake. Just before sleep drags me back down, I think I see a shadow move. Wouldn't be the first ghost to haunt these halls.

I'm not sure when I wake up. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure when I went to sleep. War games payed out in the darkest hours of the night mixed with my own futile attempts to keep myself awake for days have played havoc with my circadian rhythm, jittering through the days hopped up on unhealthy doses of coffee until I crash and wake up hours later with a pounding headache. Every time I do fall asleep, though, I always wake up with the same optimistic delusion that the last few weeks have been nothing more than an extended nightmare. The fantasy never lasts. I want to lose hope of Colt ever coming back, accept the reality of it so I can start to heal, but something in me clings stubbornly to him and refuses to let go. Sometimes without thinking, I'll set an extra place at the table, start to make an extra mug of tea, grab two blankets for the couch when it gets cold. I do everything but function normally.

But when I roll over with a sleepy groan and my arm drapes across the warm body next to me, everything falls into place. Maybe it was all a nightmare after all. Maybe he came back. Maybe miracles do happen and the world isn't out to destroy me after all. Smiling lazily, I snake my arms around the lump in the blankets beside me, lips pressing to the thrumming pulse point in an elegant neck. "Morning, baby."

A beat in time. Two. Something's off here. As my mind claws its way back to consciousness, I start to process it. The body in my arms is smaller than Colt's, more delicate, soft curves where there should be hard lines and muscular planes. Smells wrong, too, like lavender and vanilla instead of sunshine and outside. A disproportionate sense of horror settling in my veins, I force myself to crack open one eye.

I scream.

I fall out of bed with a yelp, landing in a tangled nest of blankets and spindly limbs, shuffling back across the worn floorboards until I'm huddled in a corner. No way. No fucking way. My nightmares have always been vivid, but they've never transferred to the waking world, and certainly not to the extent of me waking up next to someone who's been dead for over a year.

"D-Dahlia?" I stammer, rubbing my eyes and blinking rapidly to see if she'll fade from my vision. She doesn't, still sitting there, the exact same wild blonde curls and batshit-crazy smile that I've known all my life. It's an odd reaction, laughing, but that's what my psyche gives me, a raucous cackle that pops along the lining of my throat and pulls at my stomach muscles until they burn, stealing my breath. It takes a full minute to calm down, slumping into the corner with a breathless chuckle as I press a hand to my forehead. "Ripred almighty, I've officially lost it."

It was only a matter of time anyway.

this is for the girl next door who thinks she loves me
she adores the voice that soars into her heart
but she don't know the sadness flow that pours out nightly
still, i keep rolling the lonesome road
out before me