Ashes

Whenever I come back here, I want to be sixteen again. Or is it just a natural craving to want to feel those reckless burns beneath the soles of my feet? The desire of wanting to be young again entangled with the wrath of all of my deepest memories.

Being in this house, after over a decade, has the acid in my belly turning. The bitter taste of resentment slides up my throat, my mouth filling with saliva, no where to spit except onto the old wooden floor.

The last time my insides hit this floor was after a couple shots of Kettle and a joint. He made me smoke that night. He made me do a lot of things I didn’t want to back then.

Even after all this time, I still know exactly which steps on his staircase creak, and which ones will get me to the top without his mother ever knowing he was sneaking me into her lovely, quiet, little home.

But she’s not here anymore. She died a couple days ago. I don’t remember our first conversation. And I couldn’t tell you what she thought of me—all she did was smile. You’d think I wouldn’t want to pay my respects today, after the hell her son put me through, but it really wasn’t her fault. He’s broken.

A lot of people are here after the funeral, but I haven’t seen him yet. I use this opportunity to head upstairs. I could reach that bedroom in complete darkness, without making a sound. There should be somewhere inside the body where useless memories go to die. Instead the body keeps everything the mind wants to throw away. After all those times of creeping up and down this hallway, I still focus on the pressure I put from the placement of my heels on those creaky floorboards. God forbid I wake her up.

Two in the morning. Naive. Untried. Wide-eyed. He knew exactly how to read my vanity, and use it as an entry point. And that fed his ego. Was I nothing more than a foolish girl?

Respect and want are not the same. But it was too dark to tell the difference. He ripped my mind apart with lie after lie, after lie.

His words rubbing me like an expensive cat. His golden eyes holding my gaze, any logical thinking I could have had disappearing. Holding my breath, he traced his tongue across my lips, and along the freckle between my chest, distracting me of ever saying no.

I was alone when I first got burned. I stood there in the midst of all that heat, until every piece of me turned to cold ash. He doesn’t know, and I will never tell him.

I blame it on being young.
I blame it on him being broken.
But I think it’s all the same.

I turn the doorknob to his bedroom, and there he is. On the bed, face in his palms, in a wrinkled dark suit. He turns to me. The hue of his eyes taint from gold to dust. I know where he’s gone. There is a setting in his own head he used to visit. A lonely, sad place. Dead and empty.

I know he’s there again, because I left those ashes there inside of him.