Work Text:
ROOT-ROT
[~ the downward spiral ~]
I could show you fear in the branches of a tree. Where the leaves and their shadows split the sky like fractures in a picture window, burying between them the sun beating down and it’s light smothered too, in a heap of brokenness. The bathroom tile is unmistakable in it’s icy familiar and as wishfully foreign as veins in paper cold skin, in the fog of another winter dawn gone by. I’ve looked into the steam dusted and frost crusted mirror a thousand times for every hour in it’s absence. Pale white skin rubbed raw unto fiery—the little, scraping hellebore hurts, the meager pains to stave off the sharper memories etched splitting into other tattered canvases—only to see the pearls that were my eyes wearing the rest of me, still, and the darkened hollows they’d sunken into.
“Basil, smile—why don’t you ever smile anymore,” no-one had ever asked that, but maybe that was worse: seeing the question in her eyes and feeling the reason at the back of my throat, the tip of my tongue, and raging like a bluebird in the hellish cage of my aching ribs. Maybe I got tired of pretending, maybe I never was and I’m the picture window; all broken glass that cuts the people that try to hold me close, or something with thorns and pretty petals. Something that lies because it has to, because that’s how it was made, because… it’s safer.
It’s dark here, where there’s nothing but a waiting, like an underdeveloped polaroid: chiaroscuro smears of color dulled by the shadow teeming at the edge of my eyes. Standing the hairs of my neck on end and setting my teeth raw into the inside of my lip. Gnawing insatiably on that knot of swollen skin like anyone else starved would eat a meal.
I look away from the mirror, and down to the sink. Back of my hands braced against the counter edge, and criss-crossing lines pruned vibrant and red like hyacinth flowers down the wrists. There’s toothbrushes in a cup to one side and paste on the other. Labels blurred and my nose stinging, the tears fall with a raspy sob. Following the trail map of my cheek down to my chin, and joining the others, dripping soft and slow to their porcelain graves. A little more to the left and I can see my hoodie in mint green, too thin for the weather but thick enough to hide inside, and furthest to the right a roll of gauze and garden shears, so I don’t leave too much of a mess behind.
My fingers reach of habit to the tap, and I twist the plastic-carved-crystalline knob until the water runs. Sob a little louder, staring a little longer, at hesitation and fear spitting a coward’s stream of ruby into the basin. It’s almost pretty, like roses arranged wilting and bruised against sun-warmed marble. Always trying to find the beauty in something, no matter how broken, how hurt: if I could prove, somehow, that those things are worth loving, that the imperfect is as beautiful as the perfect… maybe…
Maybe—a rap-tap-tapping, like bone split on the stairs, “Basil? Are you okay?” Breath caught in my throat, ache faded in a hiccup, “Yeah,” and I feel the hollow of my chest constrict like a wince—too sharp, too rude, too curt, too angry—that’s not my voice, not what my voice should be; she’ll know something’s wrong with me, and maybe she already does. Clear my throat, “Sorry—I’m okay, Polly, just, ah,” a glance to the right, and then to the label-blurred left, “…brushing my teeth,” softer, breathier, and that sounds a little more like me.
Always trying to make a garden of my thoughts. Cultivate myself distinctly, and in the meanwhile I could pluck out the bad so that they… they wouldn’t smother the others’ roots. It used to work, weeding away the knots in my stomach and the static in my head and the tumult beside my beaten heart with rose-red smears.
Just like flowers, innocence wilts and dies, and weeding used to work. I’ve never feared death as much I’ve feared leaving people as broken in my absence as I’ve been in theirs.
There’s a chest-tightening silence that ensues, until she says, “Dinner’ll be ready, soon, okay? I made your favorite,” and I suck in a breath to keep from sobbing again, at the reality in her voice—the softness like silk, the warmth like candlelight, while mine sounds all rotted through. Moth-eaten and moldy, never good enough until there’s nothing left and some way to hide or cut away the damage done.
“Okay,” I say, “…thank you, I’ll—I’ll be out soon,” wash my trembling hands, my wrists, rub my face with the washcloth white. Wince at the sting, and glance back up at the mirror to make sure I hadn’t torn open a scratch. Hummingbird heart shattering against my sternum, copper on my tongue, back of the throat dry, everything will be okay.
The shadows teeming in the corners of my eyes yawn with bear trap teeth abyssal behind the glass, and, with it’s singular, bulbous, putrid eye…
s
o
m
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t
h
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‘
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… watching us.