how strange, to be anything at all; any

[adna]

and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

She expects him to lash out again; she expects him to meet her flood of fury with his own. Instead, he just absorbs the blows and she can’t help but wish he hadn’t. This would be so much easier if he sharpened his own weapons against her instead of never lifting his fists. It was so much more difficult to accept what a monster she has become when he becomes such a clear mirror image. When he lets her look at herself.

She deflates, draws inward, swallowing the poison down again and again.

“What have we done,” she whispers when he draws her close and she feels the tears on her cheeks again. She can feel it racing through her—the grief that she has never known how to turn off. So many others around her seem so capable of becoming immune to it but as the years go along, she just fractures more and more. Perhaps she grew up too sheltered. Perhaps she never learned how to truly protect herself.

Maybe she was always made to feel the way that she does.

Forever broken by the world and then remade by it.

“All I know how is to hurt people,” she confesses, pressing it into his palm. “I am so scared that I don’t know how to find my way back to good again,” and then the part that she hides from even herself begins to spill out. “I am—I am so hungry all the time.” She closes her serpentine eyes and shakes in his embrace, “I don’t even know for what, but I would tear the world apart to satiate it.”

Her fangs press against the back of her lips and she shudders.

“You have no idea who I really am.”

She can practically feel the poison on her tongue.

“You have no idea just what I am capable of.”

adna

we're setting fire to our insides for fun
collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home

@[Ophanim]