in fair verona. valentino.

elena salazar ;

you said i would've hit the ceiling
you said i should eat my feelings
head held high

I still don't recognise my bedroom.

Much like how I don't recognise my sister anymore, or my Dad. I wake up every morning in a room that's apparently mine but it doesn't feel right, I miss my old mattress and the way it creaked a little when I got up in the night. I miss knowing that it was my space, that it was how I wanted it. My wardrobe is filled with clothes that I've never warn - I should be thankful, my mother spits. She tells me to stop being such a brat. Maybe she's right, maybe it's just the teenage angst, maybe it's the idea that I'm living in a house that isn't mine, or my parents, or even Jacinta's really.

I was starting to get used to it, my bedroom. Yellow bike rested against the walls so it doesn't rust in the rain outside, my favourite clothes from before all of this draped over chairs and on the floor. It's a little messy, a little drafty, there's too much space so I try to fill it up with myself - eyes open in the morning, I'm staring up at a stranger's ceiling with the echoes of our surname in microphone screeches.

I turn, and there's a knife stabbed into my bedside table.

That means Violetta's-


dead.

Handlebars and canon fire, head-first over metal painted sunflower yellow, I don't lick at my wounds this time. My palms are scratched raw and bleeding, salt water grief stings as I wipe away my tears - god forbid they fall on my pillow cases. 

We don't mourn in this household. At least, we've never had to. Jacinta left us, a betrayal of the worst kind, and my parents went about as if she had never been there at all. Which she hadn't. But she came back. Violet never left us. Violet was here, this whole time, and-

they took her.

I should have said something. Could have said something.

And now she's dead, and I'm yanking a knife out of the wooden furniture in my bedroom and storming into the study to find my father sitting there scribbling on paper, minding his own damn business, I slam it right back into his desk and I'm not ashamed of the tear that slides down my skin.

"Got your message."

There's no point in sugar-coating, no point in playing dumb. I may be young but I'm not stupid, rash or blind.

I'll leave that to my sisters. 

"Show me how to use it, then."

To my parents, everything that happens in this household is a lesson.

Even Violet's death.

i won't take anyone down if i crawl tonight
but i still let everyone down when i change in size
and i went tumbling down trying to reach your high