Work Text:
Everything that hurts always starts with a subtle ache. A hangnail you pick and then regret only once you see blood. Damage is damage, but it takes the tangible red to make you pause, not stop. The crack in your laugh right before you start crying. Maybe a spilled bowl of half-soaked oats that you ate in your bed because it felt like the easiest place to sink into when you don’t want to be a person. And now it’s everywhere. And you can’t lie down until you’ve dealt with it.
Sometimes, it’s a missed connection or unanswered knock on the door. It’s me telling strangers everything I want to tell you.
I don’t understand soft endings. That they happen with subtle smiles and handshakes and hugs. I always smell blood in the air, in the months before a death. Like a predator before it kills. I linger at the edge of the bed and think about when I should sink my teeth into you, so you don’t wound me first. But if we’re being honest, none of us here are monsters and my body spells out prey far better than my hands tear apart flesh.
I think I hate the idea of leaving so much because you have to forget the way someone breathes. Otherwise you won’t survive the leaving. You and I both know that.
You have to give away all their leftover food in your pantry, because you never liked rice or any other preserver delight, and you have to gather scattered clothes from the floor and throw them out on the lawn with a scream.
It happens so fast and suddenly; years pass and the person you were at twenty no longer exists. The person they were at twenty-five is now thirty and you wouldn’t recognize them in the grocery store because they swore they would never have kids and now someone who has their eyes (and you could never forget their eyes) is sitting in the cart, begging for sweets.
This is the worst part, seeing what you each have become and understanding that those pieces will never fit together again. That those people are gone and are never coming back.
Somewhere along the way, you forgot my lips sometimes tasted like honey, like the kind you wouldn’t mind getting messy for.
You forgot while I got stuck and I’m starting to feel like a fly caught in a web, hopeless and insignificant.
Please eat your apologies and choke on your regret. I am no longer the person who is kind to unkindness.
Endings are not poetic. They turn you into a throbbing bottomless pit where your hands fail to reach the surface again and again and again no matter how hard you try— and a litany of other, prettier descriptions written by people with the same pain as me, but more grace to unwind the coil of it.
You cannot pull yourself up, so you cry until you drown yourself and they place flowers at the bank in the memory of you, as you stagger back out of the murky depths, muddied as webs you weave, unbecome and unwelcome. You stand, half-corpse at the bank and watch them place flowers in your hair, watch them say something about how grief blooms and dies every season.
Death isn’t pretty but I can make it beautiful. And that scares me a little less than it should. I turn everything into carnage and call it art until there’s only bones and memories left for the onlookers to feast on. I want the meat and potatoes, always. I’m sorry for telling everyone how you hurt me when you can’t yell at me, but I’m not. I’m not sorry for telling all the ways you ate away at me.
The days you called me honey and left teeth marks on my skin and poured me out on the kitchen counter until I was empty and aching. You really did mean it when you called me sweet, didn’t you? Something to satisfy a hunger you knew wouldn’t last. Why did you have to mean it?
The woman addresses the crowd of bystanders:
To think of me is to walk alongside the beach, watching the sunset, hand-in-hand with grief. And I hope you do. And I hope you do it often.