Chest full of secrets

When I first saw her burdens, she wore them like bows in her hair.

They say you can romanticize someone else’s pain. Just like you can be in awe of the night sky. But negligent of its terror.

She was consumed in darkness except for the street light that illuminated her. Her hair was wet from the sprinkling rain. It glistened on her, resembling the stars. Beads of water falling like crystals, traced the outline of her slender face.

She was sad yet beautiful. A combination more lethal and intoxicating than the moonshine that was outlawed.

Her father was criticizing her in that moment, I saw. And not the kind of criticism that is good for the spirit. The type of words you grow up with in your head. Instilled in your being. You can never wash their stain off your skin.

Her face only broke momentarily. Something her father wouldn’t be able to notice. And not like he’d care to try to anyways. Though, I noticed. That look she had, would plague my conscience.

If any of my friends asked how we’d met. I would lie and say she had asked for my help. Because how stupid could you be to sacrifice your cozy, familiar life for a stranger?

I would hide behind my ego and say to myself; “morally what choice did I have?”

I wanted to save her.

But her insecurities would be fanned by serpents whispers. The whispers of her friends. Empty souls. Vacant parking lots. People that didn’t matter. In my hell, I consider these types of people as the true gate keepers on the road to the damned.

She even gave the damned a voice.

“It was pity. He pities you.” Her friends would declare about me. They’d be in some random coffee booth downtown.

The booth she could of been in with me. Taking pictures on her Polaroid. Drunk off laughter, buzzed from coffee and cheap cigarettes.

Her friends never elevated her, like she deserved. Like I did. They could only cling onto her dreams. Deadweight. It teeter tottered and lifted themselves higher up. While dragging her down.

It was just like the day, I met her with her father. She looked for him in all the people she met. Surrounding herself with the lowest quality of human beings. Motel 6 bed sheets. Off brand boxes promising the same result. Yet in the end you would of rather not eaten.

A daughters curse of love: loving her father so much she let other people treat her like he did. Subjecting herself to the same inward humiliation. I suppose that’s what you do with people that leave. You somehow foster a false picture to depict them. You borrow van goghs eyes, making madness an abstract idol.

She remembered the better times more than the rotten. And all I could see was her at 11 years old, a girl chasing her fathers station wagon down their two acres of land. She wore her pajamas. He had tried to slip away around dawn. She ran after him, screaming “Daddy!”

He never stopped his car.

And when I had met her at 20, he had just revisited her life. Reappeared out of nowhere. She was to inherit a large sum of money at the age 21, come to find out. How she never did the math?

How she never thought he was after her rightful wealth, was one of those sick delusions she cocooned herself in. The ones I had grown to despise.

Sometimes I would yell at her. I was always gentle. But I had to wake her up. She would get real still. Her eyes open and trancelike. “He doesn’t love you!” I would holler. She wouldn’t hear it, submerged in her own protective daze. I would beg for her to see true love would never wither her.

Because if she really looked inside of herself- she’d find a gnarled vine of thorns constricting around her heart. The heart I wanted to hide away in a treasure chest. I would handcuff her father to the handle of it. And I would push it to the bottom of a lake. Perhaps the same one with sightings of the lochness monster. I would hold my breath just to see his last.

Don’t fall in love with a broken girl. She’s some other forces voodoo doll. An instrument for the despair, you dance with alone. Captivating and wondrous. But to just call it that would make it something good. Would make it a mild affliction.

No, it was painful. So painful sometimes I would remember all of it. I would fall to the floor, gripping my ribs- imagining her father kicking me over and over; just like he had done with her.

I guess pain can really transfer. Even the one that wasn’t mine to bear. When I first saw her burdens, she wore them like bows in her hair.