The Darkness

Darkness has surrounded me like a shroud since the day I was forced upon this Earth; a mousy girl born under the grayest of November skies. The girl you think you’ve seen countless times here, or maybe there.

But I’m neither here, nor there.

Not beautiful, nor ugly.

I bleed without pain, and sleep without dreaming.

If a rift between the dead and the living exists, every numb, faceless mass that aimlessly wanders it would pass through my body unfettered. Yet I walk with living dirt beneath my feet.

I’ve grown so accustomed to emptiness, that when you’re lingering behind my eyelids, mouth agape with a biting laughter, it’s akin to a loving caress. For this single shard of a feeling, I am thankful.

Yet, it is not enough. The darkness extinguishes embers of gratitude like ash itself smothers a flame.

My decision is mine, and it has been made.

The only questions remain: Will you know the why, and the way?

As I lay, a crushed disarray of innards spread across the side of dusty tracks, every spark of dying electricity within my brain is wired to my dried-out left eye. It watches through the fog for the vultures — but mostly for you.

I hope you arrive first.

So your eyes can take in how much your hatefulness turned me inside out. How much just a sliver of compassion could have mattered. How easily the darkness can take any of us; here amidst the willing illusions of the light.

As slight of a frame as I occupy, the chance you'll be the one to find its lifelessness first is slighter still. I use my final intelligible thought to pray the smashing metal’s vibration has expanded the hairline crack in your picture window, as to point me out amid the crimson bushes.

I’m sure you’re in there. In your room; the largest of the rooms in the smallest of houses in the tiniest of towns in the saddest of states. The room with the window that bears a scar from a single pebble.

The one I threw the first day of the longest month in the last year of a short life.

You may remember it. The day you told me to die.

Through the neural blood caking over my right eye, you finally appear in what I can only assume is like a dream. Weaving from transparency to darkness, the buzzing of your neon aura sending a faint, yet urgent signal to the shredded remnants of my frontal lobe.

Two words, a double-sided sword that severs me from the inside out.

"Come back".

The red light moves closer, whispering a cry that turns into a blaring scream as it searches me out. Then, silence.

Snapping sharply into a new realm, I see with new eyes skies even grayer than the ones in my November.

The long-gone screeching should have my ears ringing. Eerie quiet fills them instead.

Stealing a sideways glance to the dirt road that ends at your house, I suddenly realize that I’m already gliding over it. The train tracks grow further away in both distance and memory.

The faceless masses take notice of me, but not much. Approaching your house, I hone in on the crack in your picturesque window, and follow its lead to find you inside.

I struggle for a glimpse as the masses suddenly swarm your house like a black cloud, their grim reflections in the window masking what I was once dying to see.

Pulling forward, I find myself walking through them, unfettered. The crack reveals to me your dark blood pooling on your cool, wooden floor.

Biting laughter materializes from the masses, taunting, haunting, and divine.

The darkness that took you was mine.

I still sleep without dreaming.

But now, days are silent.

And I am thankful.