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Kai stares into a mirror slanted in the hallway. He wonders if his eyes were always so broken. The one that works, anyway. He imagines himself plucking out his glass eyeball and tossing it on the wall, like a tennis ball in a prison yard. Would he do that? He doesn’t know.
He tries to think about things he loves. The first to come to mind are his siblings. He sees his own battered face soften into a luminous and genuine smile. His love for Lloyd and Nya so apparent it makes his stomach sick.
Kai tries to harden his expression. Make it less… real. Make it less like a street lamp flowing through his smile and into his infectious affection. The want so apparent and ugly on his face. The want to be something more than a reaction created by circumstance. He suffocates it. Too entranced by the enticement of safety. Too mesmerized by the allure of silence in his mind. No matter how loud his heart speaks, he is only a shallow shell of a human being. Desperate to find a place and purpose in this punishing existence. He wants to be real. He wants to know he is tangible and worth something. He knows his only worth is that of the last pile of ashes in a bonfire.
He hates being alone in his thoughts. Too many silly questions like “Who are you?” And “Would you ever live for yourself?”. They don’t matter. He’s only meant to be a moldable clay, shaped by his environment. He is nothing but a sharp blade crafted by invisible hands. A product isn’t made by wishing it was something else. How laughable would it be if clay had dreams of their own? If metal wanted to be a pot, not a weapon? If a ceramic knife wanted to shatter and melt back into pieces just to have control over itself? Would that be insanity? Would that give him even a semblance of self? Would that make him find a grain of worth in his body?
He begs his thoughts. “If only I cried softer. If only I were less useless. If only I could be something more substantial than an empty bag of regret.” His thoughts are only an echo chamber. The same helpless pleas carrying into the abyss.
His body creaks with every movement. He doesn’t know when he started leaning against the wall. His joints echo back his years of servitude to only others. His mangled and scar-kissed hands always reminding him that he is nothing but a child with a death wish. His bones beg to be broken free, and laid upon the dirt to fertilize the soil. Isn’t this what he wants? To be useful? To raise the next generation? Isn’t that a perfect legacy? To be feasted upon by worms and letting the earth reclaim what little it can salvage from his horrible, putrid, all too real, all too beating, heart?
His skin threatens to burn him alive. His throat closes around every word. He is drowning. He is sinking. He is nothing. He is everything. He is burning. His tears threaten to tear his throat apart with all the guilt of being alive.
His life is nothing but a matchbook. Burning the candle at both ends. He is the candle and the match and the hand striking it. He is every fiber of the cotton spool setting the barn ablaze. He is every speck of paint on the car door when it explodes from a gas leak.
He is a dying wish trying it’s best to live.