elodie {capitol/fin}

Trapped behind that static screen I was.

Behind the blurring sight and flickering sound was the mind of a girl far lost, a compass that’s been void of its magnetic field for one day too many. Every mountain pointing north and every valley pointing south with the clouds pointing east and west like neither had any significance in the end. Wandering lost I was, searching for an x marked upon sky or sea. Words spoken by a stranger or passerby did nothing but leave me stumbling over the same when night fell, locked behind that closed door staring into a darkness that left me illuminated.

Reality in terror became nothing more than a wake-up call.

For the early hours of morning screamed for a silence far louder than anything else I had heard previously, and with a jolt I would throw myself from the bed, standing over a floor that seemed to shift under my feet. Hidden under carpet I would imagine the concrete was giving way, a map of troubles written by a hand never steady enough to scratch legible letters, h’s slurring into e’s as the pen fell to the floor.

Help m—

Imaginative was a dangerous word for it. For my father never attested it to anything else, nothing more than a child with a runaway imagination and no will to put an end to it. Tales woven by thought and deliberation were never interesting, for planning never lead to anything more than the end of creativity. Horror and spontaneity led to something more—something raw and unforgiving, much like the tone that rang out in the light of morning when he’d open the door to my body at the window, hair knotted and tired eyes turned to the rising sun.

“You didn’t sleep again.”

Never a question; simply a statement of fact and nothing more, they typicality of it all just a broken record scratching against his mind. I was nothing more than this alone, a burden on already heavy shoulders if he was required to word it. He spent the best of three weeks trying to correct it, waking up when he heard my frame crash against those hollow walls. He never seemed sure of what to do, standing in the doorway like his presence had ever been a comfort in its own when it had truly been the opposite.

I never knew quite what to make of the times when he would kneel beside me in the dead of night, laying a hand on my shoulder until I managed to shrink away from it in a manner not sudden enough to shock him. One second too soon and his sanity would snap with my own, the knot tied between our blood a moment away from leaking from the genetic veins which we shared.

Family was a fragile thing.

Yet he never treated it as so.

To him it was nothing more than a game of the lost, the damned, and the sinners, for he played the second while my forgotten mother played the last and I filled the position of the first. He lingered on the thoughts of her like alcohol lingered on his tongue, the cure to his detriment nothing more than that which made him forget.

I wished to forget, but each passing second of a life lived behind those white washed walls meant nothing more than moment spent above ground, where the air was thick and the burden was thicker.

Dead weight didn’t get a say, after all.

And on the occasions I’d question his motive—not in three years I hadn’t—he’d turn to the side, eye contact broken like the lock on our front door, speaking in a tone he didn’t believe I had the capacity to hear, “Just like your goddamn mother.” At least she had been given the option, able to walk out the front door, needing nothing more than bravery and will. I had both, yet my fingers scratched at my door with the longing for a sun I could only see through the cracks in the blinds.

I was his dark-haired, incoherent mess of a calamity, a pawn in every blackmail scheme he ended up on the wrong side of—

“I’ll tell about her.”

“That’s a low blow if I’ve ever seen one.”

“Has this ever been a game of niceties?”

A life lived never was.

And yet the years spent behind shut doors was a game neither of niceties or tragedies, simply a stalemate between that of desires that burned within my heart and the rules that were set to keep the flame contained.

A fire meant nothing if there was no one there to add kindle to the flame.

Fire starter—he called me this, nightmares the spark used to ignite the flame of my fear. With rapid breath and flickering focus I’d turn my sight to the ceiling above my head, the fan spinning with such velocity that my stomach churned. Better than the voice beside my head, the questioning of sanity when there was none to be found.

The poster child for unstable thought was nothing more than dead weight on a burdened man’s shoulders, a reality he could not face in the same way she could not bear to face her nightmares.

Nightmares were never confined to the time spent away, but rather the reality of waking up to the flames licking at my heels, the reminder that this did not end with that distant sunrise that lingered outside my window.

Dark hair; tired eyes—my answer could not be found in the morning sky, but ever, oh ever did I plainly try.

Attempts made and attempts failed were the epitome of a soul set on the repetitive pattern of dead weight, a burden to the one person who crossed my path.

In the beginning, he promised my name would be more than poison on his tongue.

Six letters never bit into skin so deeply. Three syllables strung together like a noose about his neck, each time he spoke it cutting into his throat, air supply running low each time I crossed his mind. Daughter was worse—a recognition of the blood that ran through our veins sharing any similarity in the slightest.

Burdens come and burdens go, but shame did not play by the same set of rules.

Terror did not, either.

So while he carried shame on his shoulders I tossed about terror, the flickering of the night its commiseration. No word spoken was heard; no silence left to sit was acknowledged.

“You didn’t sleep tonight.”

“And I’m sure your conscience let you sleep easy as well?”

(“Just like your goddamn mother.”)

At least she wasn’t caught behind this static screen.

odair