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you are cold. it’s not unusual – you’re always cold these days. since your brother died and his ghost appeared at his funeral and looked at you with cold dead eyes and a cold dead smile. the dead have never been friendly. he doesn’t hate you, nowhere near as much as you hate yourself at least.
you are high. again, not unusual. it’s been a near constant since you first discovered the brain numbing silence and tranquillity that come with the sickly lurch of a fresh high. you’ve taken molly this time, and the lights around you are spinning and the room feels like it is moving too slowly but the music is spreading into your bones and you find yourself dancing without even thinking about it. someone might dance with you. you can’t tell. you’re thirsty and you order a drink from the bar. four drinks appear in front of you. you didn’t order four drinks. you drink them anyway. you’re not even old enough to drink.
you dance and drink and laugh and hope nobody can tell how fake it is. it doesn’t matter anyway. none of these people know who you are. none of them care. you laugh as the neon lights of the rave reflect off the people around you. you think the high might be fading so you take another pill.
you might have made a mistake. it doesn’t matter. you throw up all four of the four drinks you didn’t order. the room still spins and the lights dance but it’s less fun and more terrifying. you might be on fire. you might be dying. you’re not dying. you’re definitely burning. you order another four drinks but only one arrives.
at night, you dream. these dreams are never good. there’s death and blood and gore and things no eighteen-year-old should be forced to see. things nobody should be forced to see. your bed is cold. you are cold. the bed was never yours. nothing has ever felt like yours. except the ghosts. except the fear. those have belonged to you just as your green eyes once belonged to your mother.
you burn blue like a dying star. you’ve never been colder. you burn your arm with a lighter and are almost surprised to find your skin doesn’t melt and drip to the floor like water. it crackles red. you have four burns now but you only remember one. you’ve never burnt yourself. you’re always burning.
you’ve never been the favourite. you never wanted to be. one was the favourite. you’ve never liked that number. even numbers are better, round ones like four even more so. two plus two equals four. you’re not even half the man diego is. you don’t want to be either.
you’re running. this house is made of brick and stone and it’s so cold and you run run run but it never leaves you. no matter how far you get the dark brick and harsh lighting and cold cold cold rooms never ever let you rest. you might never outrun it. you don’t stop trying.
you dream, and in that dream, you sit in a straw house with a straw dog. you feed the straw dog. you watch tv. you are on the tv. you burn the straw house and the straw dog to the ground. it doesn’t help.
you don’t blame ben for being dead. you do, however, blame him for annoying you. there’s no straw house he says, no straw dog. he can’t see them, not like you can. nobody has understood you before anyway. you smoke some weed and the room turns to soft static and the tv shows you this straw house but it also shows you watching it and that hurts your brain too much to comprehend. you want to run away. you can’t imagine ever leaving. there’s no escape. you think you might already have escaped. you can’t tell anymore. you never can these days.
you want an adventure, so you make one yourself. you leave and the streets are hectic and terrifying and you can’t sleep because you’re scared but you’ve never felt more alive. ben stays. he doesn’t have a choice. you never stop running. you never find the words to articulate why umbrellas scare you so much. you don’t go out in the rain anymore.
you sit on a park bench one january day and think about your past. you think about child abuse and being the abuser. you think about dark corners and fear and a strict routine. you think about being twelve years old and discovering painkillers and then being thirteen and discovering alcohol. you don’t regret any of it. you regret all of it. it was never your choice to make. you think if you could, you would do the same things again. not out of enjoyment, but because you can’t choose otherwise. you’ve never been able to. you wonder who you’d be if you grew up elsewhere, with a loving family. there’s a stranger watching you in the puddle beside the bench and his face matches your own but its marked by the droplets of rain falling from the sky. you don’t recognise him. you don’t want to.
grief is a foreign concept to you. it’s the most familiar feeing in the world. you don’t understand it. you don’t want to understand it. you’re going to die one day. you wonder if people will grieve you. probably not. you want to be grieved. you want to be missed. you want to be loved so forcefully it stiches the broken pieces of you back together.
you don’t think you’d be missed. you don’t want to stick around to find out. your family don’t talk to you anyway. the alive ones at least. ben doesn’t get a choice, even if he hates it. you burn too bright to die. you think you might already be dead.
you’re sick. sicker than you’ve ever been. it’s terrifying. you’re going to die alone and nobody will care. you’ve already been dead years. your body is rotting. you lift an arm and expect your skin to slide off and slop to the floor. it doesn’t but your arm aches with the effort. you’re dying but every part of you worth saving died years ago anyway. you won’t be missed. you want to be missed.
psychosis. the doctors tell you it’s psychosis. that’s not fair. you want to scream. you’re not lying about seeing the dead. why don’t they understand that? why don’t they leave you alone? you haven’t had a coherent thought for years. you might have understood why they said this if you could stop watching the straw house on the tv in the nice hospital room. allison probably paid for it. she’s rich now. you wonder if she would miss you. you see her on the tv in the straw house and watch as she feeds the dog. the dog is black. you blink and it’s now white. the dog hasn’t moved. years have passed and they’re still waiting for a response. you don’t know what the question is.
ben watches you. he watches you dream and wake up screaming. you don’t want to be sober. you tell him if you die you want to be cremated. there’s nothing he can do about that, but it’s nice to tell someone. you break out of hospital after two weeks. it’s been six years since you left the academy. it’s been six hours since you visited it in your dreams.
the number four seems to haunt you. you hear it in your dreams. you don’t like even numbers. you don’t like odd numbers. you miss your siblings. you can’t imagine seeing them ever again. it hurts. you want to tell them what’s going on but they’d never understand. you’re scared of your own mind. you’ve never been more alone.
the problem with your life, you think on one sunny day six months after leaving the hospital, is that it never belonged to you. you tell ben this and he gives you a confused look and a noncommittal shrug. he looks confused a lot these days. and concerned. you can’t find it in yourself to care. you’ve never felt better. you’ve also never felt worse.
your father dies and it’s been years since you went home but it’s been four hours since you dreamt about it. you find out in an ambulance after leaving a rehab centre you don’t remember staying in and receiving treatment for an addiction you don’t want to let go of. your chest aches as you take a deep breath and you think about how close you were to dying and wonder if anyone would have missed you. you watch your father’s pathetic funeral and think about if that’s what yours would be like. the thought brings you no comfort. you think about burning everything down to the ground and running far far away. you settle for stubbing out a cigarette into his ashes and try not to laugh manically.
nobody takes you seriously. that’s okay. you’ve never taken yourself seriously. you think you might be dying for real this time. but then again, death has never stuck to you. you’ve always been weird. you’ve always been cold. you think the reason you might be able to talk to ghosts is because you’ve always been one of them. somewhere between living and dead and nowhere close to alive but nowhere close to death either. you exist in between. alone. cold.
your brother is back. not the dead one. the one who disappeared. the dead one never left even if you wish he had sometimes. he looks thirteen and tiny. you think about being thirteen and breaking into the infirmary to steal fentanyl. you think about drinking yourself into a coma at that age and cry for the childhood you missed. you think back to that park bench on the rainy winter day where you thought about child abuse and you want to go back and wipe that day from your mind and also every subsequent day ever. you want to hug yourself as a child. you wouldn’t do anything differently. you would change everything. you have never been one for making decisions. you wish things were different but there’s never been another option.
you listen to the ghosts and think about being one of them. screaming and wailing constantly and hoping something changes. nothing ever changes. you wonder what you have to do to get someone to listen.
you find out two days after your brother comes back and six days before the world is supposed to end. you don’t think the world ending is that bad. nobody agrees. you open a briefcase after spending two days tied up and tortured and when you shut your eyes you are sat on a dirty bus home and when you open them the grass is wet beneath you and the tent is dark and heavy with pressing gunfire.
you find love. you’ve never known love before. it warms your bones. suddenly, you’re not alone in the straw house. there’s someone else to share the pain with. there’s someone by your side. you keep getting shot and you get a tattoo for every time you almost die but not quite. a tally of sorts. you profess your love unapologetically. you’ve never loved this fiercely before. it scares you. for the first time in your life, you see a future for yourself.
you’ve been around death your whole life, but you’ve never seen anyone die up close before. never watched the light fade from their eyes. you wonder if there’s any light left to fade from your eyes. you don’t want to find out the answer. you hold his chest like it’s going to keep the blood from spilling out. the blood is hot. the ground is hot. the sky is hot. you’ve never been colder. you might be sick. you’re definitely screaming.
it's been ten months since you left the academy. it’s been nine months and twelve days since you visited it in your dreams. this might be a new record. you don’t care. you’ve never cared less. you feel numb. you’ve never been in more pain.
he visits you in your dreams that night. tells you that you can sleep now. you can rest. he wasn’t supposed to say that. you dreamt he said that. you thank him. sorry about the blood in your mouth, you tell him. you wish it was yours. your blood in his throat. your blood in your throat. you miss him so much it crawls up your spine and wraps its cold hands around your throat and threatens to choke you out. it’s raining when you wake. it might always be raining. it’s definitely always cold.
someone had to leave first. that’s how the story always goes. doesn’t mean you have to like it. love ruins you. you were already ruined. you’ve never felt more whole than when you were with him and you’ve never felt emptier than now.
you think about dying. you think about sobriety. you think they might be one and the same. you wonder if your brain will ever function properly again. you hope so. it would be nice to not drown. it would be nice to stop burning. you don’t know if that’s possible anymore.
the straw house visits you in your dreams. you find it comforting. this time, you feed the dog. it doesn’t scare you anymore. not even when the tv shows you drinking those four drinks all that time ago. you’ve grown since. you haven’t changed a bit.
you flush your remaining pills. you’ve never been more scared. you’ve made peace with your choice. the screaming never stops. you wonder how much longer you can keep going. too long. it’s not long enough. you want to talk to him. he never appears. he doesn’t want to talk to you.
you dream of him, and you wake with tears drying on your face. he’s still dead, but you’re not alone anymore. you think about how proud he’d be if he could see you now. the thought brings you warmth. you no longer feel cold.
you might even have stopped burning. you can’t tell.