02-21-2016, 09:35 PM
marvel
of being intimate with brokenness
I remember sleeping for what felt like eons, just waiting, wishing, the idea of my existence becoming more and more tangible with every moment that swept past me. That world, the first one, it crumbled as I grew stronger. Sometimes I felt bad, I felt guilt – though it was not a concept I really understood – that this bright warm place would die so that I might live. But it was impossible to resist the way my skin, if a concept can really have skin, hummed and my ears buzzed with so much offered energy. There was another world waiting for me, and there was new warmth and different bright, and love. Love for me.
I was special, they promised me.
It was a lie though, or a mistake, because when I got to this new place there was no one waiting for me. My eyes opened and the only thing staring back at me was a reflection. Mine. This scrawny girl with dirty brown eyes and skin like a murky blue ocean. I understood immediately why they hadn’t waited to meet me. Why they couldn’t, wouldn’t love me. But that was okay, I didn’t need to be special- I wanted more, I always would, but this would be enough. To be real, to be something more tangible than a thought, more literal than a concept.
A mistake of magic, bred by loneliness and depravity.
So many years later and I am still very much the same. The meadow is the only home I have ever known or needed, the changing crowds the only family I have ever deserved. There was no one special, no one who meant anything more to me than anyone else- except for one, one face that reappeared on the bodies of different strangers in even stranger dreams. I had met him years ago, just in passing, he was black like the night with eyes as sad and orange as a harvest moon. I hadn’t known him, but I think he knew me. I could see it in his face, that dangerous flicker of recognition, like he was seeing a ghost that never should have existed. It might have made sense for me to stop and ask him why, but the guilt in his face, the suspicion left like a stain, it scared me. I never saw him again, and I regret that now, my fear. I regret the loneliness too, just a little.
And now, as I stand at the edge of the water again with only my reflection staring back at me, I realize how very little has changed. My eyes are still plain and brown, maybe a little sadder now and with more secrets sunk like ships at the bottoms. My face is longer too, and more narrow, and my legs seem awkwardly long beneath me. The blue is the same though, murky and dull, framed by black on my legs and face. At the time I had been confident that I looked nothing like him, nothing like the man from meadow all those years ago. But now staring down at a plain, slender creature with sad, lonely eyes and the shadow of uncertainty twisting the curve of my mouth, I’m not so sure.
on the surfaces of who I am
idk how to first person, pls forgive