kaijsa; d6 [fin]

This home was as hollow as my heart.

No cover for panes of glass and no pictures plastered to the wall I wished to put the past out of mind for the time it wasted. There was no grace in failure; no faith in personal despair. And though the floors had been put to waste in years that were left only to fatal pages of history, there seemed to be the echo of a footstep left behind, a mother with too much heart married to a man who had none to give. Wedded by contemporary nature sure to wane with the next full moon there was no disappointment to be found in this assumption.

They believed that a child would fix a problem far greater than either of their sins.

But he let his footsteps resound across the stage of a curtain call one time final when truth was turned at the discretion of his fault. No daughter of his would share genetics of a mother who refused to understand the dire nature of a situation he could not explain— she insisted this was because the issue was nonexistent in itself; he for if nothing other than denial.

Echo of empathy in the back of his throat he offered compensation but she was to take none, optimistic until realism planted seeds of doubt in the cracks in her skin— she would live only to see the same sown in the skin of her daughter.

But loss of hope leads to prayer in the slight of night, when the sky threatens to shatter under the burden of the sinners, and all that’s left to be seen are the faces of the anxious illuminated by candlelight, eyes turned to the heavens in patience of a gods wealth or wrath.

Pacing across the wooden floor of an empty home eighteen years past, a fingertip skims the doorknob of her room, a reminder of a mother no longer obsessed with the positivism that ran through her veins in times prior. A mother hopeful of implanting empathy in the heart of a stone cold daughter, she would turn over in her grave to see the resemblance of her father laced in a strong jaw and narrowed eyes.

Hollow halls were always more welcoming in the sight of silence, anyhow.

My palm pressed the backside of a mirror with glass pressed to the wall, there was no desire in a churning mind to see anything at all.

A reflection of hatred seen by eyes of the hated there was no place in a crammed mind for anything menial. Self-sufficiency was one of these, left to rot among the restless and the dying. Empty halls and hollow walls, there would be nothing to find in my grave when the only thing to be heard would be the trumpet’s call.

Morals to be set upon a pedestal I was left to polish a glass case sheltering nothing at all, caught between the fine line of poor and altogether wealthy I locked up empty space and threw away the key. Nothing of desperation could be grasped by pale fingers or scratched by bitten nails. Rather calloused fingertips ran across the blank space like an empty canvas, painting in shades of red to spell out the word control. Knuckles placed against dents in the wall there was only a question left to fall upon the broken windows.

Never answered; never asked.

Instead I was to be content with missing pieces and unsure steps, feeling for cracks in confidence only to find my faults laid out in plain sight, a reminder of the vulnerable hidden in the shadows of those who stood tall, false faith in the unknown only to define the six letters spelled in succession.

A name not to be spoken by any but select lips alone, pressed to the crook of a neck, defined as neither lover nor foe. Only to be found in close quarters there was only silence in the presence of the multitude, for the single mind was much easier to maintain than that of the masses.

To be trampled by the feet of the many or to fall from grace by the few, I had been counting the days to my detonation since the fuse had been lit, the day I turned the mirrors around and stripped the white-washed walls to the bare.

Empty halls to match an empty chest— I had never been one for luxuries.

A father gone and a mother distant there was nothing to be found in the space between my mind and these walls, a thought lost in the time it took to travel between the two. Desires left to dangle in the distance there was no redemption for the restless.

Patience may be a virtue but I’d be damned to call it mine, for there was fire within my nerves and a tingling in my spine.

I’d list that which I did possess upon the wall if I believed them to deserve anything other than the blank space that laid there currently.

Six letters scratched upon their surface— it was the only kingdom upon which I could carve my name in stone and swear it’d be remembered, always fallible in a world of the fickle.

Never a word spoken outside of necessity, there was no need for chaos outside of command. No force of task to be recommended outside of the required. Attention to detail in the forefront of a decision never to be made— I could not find common cause in the suffering of another without watching blood spill from my veins in a concurrent time.

Control never to be sacrificed in place of sympathy there was only silence to be found in the seconds that passed within that empty house. But the balanced boards beneath my feet were never to be swayed beneath the breeze of a fickle fortune.

I do not leave control to the chance of the calloused hearts of a people never to be swayed by an opinion not their own.

I’d rather see their empty hearts be laid out in the space between these hollow walls.