liminality; shelby

Sometimes I thought she never truly existed.

My mother has said that I have begun to talk to the corners like my mind is still sharper than the angles at which these two points meet. Her voice is tinged with something that sometimes resembles worry, but more often than not it resembles remembrance, and I wonder that if this sister of mine truly did exist, that this girl who slept in the stars and meditated in the moon really did tread the same ground as I now did— if this is how her decline began as well.

What if my mother was simply preparing herself for the inevitable loss of sanity that seemed to linger in these walls like rotting wood, like a rotting framework that was about to give way under the weight of a hollow chest and screaming mind—

The sky was blank tonight.

I hated the quiet that it brought about, because then there was no sister of mine to gaze upon, nothing but an empty lawn and an absence of light that I could not fill with my own heart—but I suppose that even then this would not be the solution, for my mind had been dimming and my heartbeat slowing since I began to see her still tread the perimeters of this home three years after being consumed by a darkness greater than her own.

I had searched for her long after she had marked her place.

She left me nothing—no love, no last words, no memories that I truly wished to stow away. I could only sift through the empty phases of her worthless death for so long before the endeavor grew old. I stared at those empty spaces until my eyelids burned, until the black and white turned to specks of color and I forgot what the premise of it all truly was.

Three-- four years and I had been looking for simply something.

Four fucking years of searching through graveyards, of reading books that were supposed to unlock the answers through an easel painted empty now but once scattered with stars—how fitting that tonight was the night that everything would be drawn to the void.

Still searching for something until I found the consummation in myself—desperation was eating away at the last remaining flesh that clung to my ribs and protected this now frail heart of mine from the dangers of truth and the shock of pure loss.

Maybe less than something and more of a desperate attempt for anything I watched the apparition of my sister appear on the lawn. I had been searching for something—anything and perhaps I found it in the transparent skin of Cha Leviane stepping carefully across smooth pebbles and soft ground.

The void had grown and consumed this mind, and with desperation laced into my veins like the only substance that I required for lifeline I flung myself from the room, papers scattered on the floor fluttering to new resting places as the door made contact with the wall, simply one more dent in the damaged and the damned--- what additional harm can be done to that which was already desecrated?

Hallways passing and pictures blurring the front door becomes a rite of passage and I find myself stumbling down the stairs, crossing the same gravel path and finding comfort among the change of texture beneath bare feet that have paced across hardwood for four years too long.

Four years and too many steps to count I trip over edging stones and fall to my knees in the grass, scraped palms and a bleeding heart finding place along the way. She does not flinch, does not make mention of my misfortune or acknowledge my presence as my breath catches quietly in a dry throat.

Her name is no longer revelation—no longer hymnal, prayer, or sacred.

I do not let it escape my throat, for I have swallowed my despair on the premise of the void for four years too many to throw it away on the first notion of hope that has changed the rhythm of my heart in the time it has taken to see her sanity crack.

The first hint of a downward slope is the crest of the hill that hides it.

Perhaps this is where I peaked, when I sat in silence on scraped knees and watched my sister take careful steps to the hammock my father could never bring himself to remove. It was almost as if he believed in second comings, in the resurrection and the renewal of something great and something gained and sometimes something lost—

There was but one problem with this, for my sister was many things but she never was holy.

But regardless of the status she was here she was ten paces in front of me she was still void and lost and empty but still she was here and when I reach out, when my palm bleeds red and threatens to mar the transparency of whatever was left of her—she was gone.

Consumed by the void, how ironic that tonight I would suffer the same fate.

My hand lingers, drips blood onto the soft grass under which my feet were just moments ago worshiping but can now only see as simply cursed ground. I crawl forward, my legs refusing to find the stability that once brought me to stand vigil at the window every night for three—four years passing with the promise of nothing and now there was something and the something was gone.

I take hold of the base of that goddamn hammock and sob.

I do not know what I was sobbing for, because Cha Leviane has been gone for four fucking years or maybe she never truly was here and maybe I was simply a lost existence fading but I sobbed for something because I simply could.

I had watched her conform to darkness once and now for the second time I was reminded that things could always worsen, and as I clung to the base of the wooden hammock I prayed that if I lifted my head I would find the transparent face of a mystery whose entire existence hinged on the presence of a story, on the string of words that never began with tradition.

When the void then offers out its hand for me to take, it looks an awful lot like the transparent palm of Cha Leviane and the promise of nothing at all but still something in a mind that now raised the question of existence while lingering three inches in front of my face.

Her face is blank, a white slate wiped clean—she has never looked so pure.

I reach out to lay my hand upon her cheek, and instantly it bleeds red and disappears, and I begin to sob once more.

How delicately I have searched for something for four years’ time if only to destroy it in its wake.