I could tell you what it was like. I could pour my honey into your ear and dribble dream, I could wave dirty needles in your face, I could threaten. You'd know without seeing and the lack of vision would cause shudder instead of revulsion, hate of a scientific designation instead of yourself. You would crawl into the arms and legs of your blankets and warm yourself with not me not me not me not me not me. And nobody could ever take that away.
I don't believe in unhappy accident or fortune - I don't believe in genetic predestination or a simple error in upbringing. I believe I have been readying myself for the lights to go out since they were turned on, and while I don't blame myself, I certainly can't blame anybody else. Because if part of me didn't want it to happen, it never could have. I thought I was pearl but I was black glass shot through with steel, glass so cloudy I could barely see through.
So this is it. Now. I'll tell you what it's like. You want to know.
It has always been there, in your hand. You used to call it the claw. Whenever you would recall past traumas it would tense slightly, up and down, clench and undone. And as you got older and the hurts seeped through the cracks you very slowly and luxuriously lost control - a flex became a twitch, a twitch a flinch, and then a punch. Your knuckles would crack against the wall and you would know why and laugh.
And you'd see it like molten rock that you can't stop cracking under the ocean and it would boil through and it would burn you and it would always burn you and you knew then that it would never go away. So you punch your knuckles bloody. You sharpen knives on skin and pull out hair and your mind begins to twist very slowly like slow steamed darkwood. And everybody knows you, and you know you, but there's a part you can never know and you can feel it throbbing in the snow and you let it for a time because it lets you feel connected - connected to something you couldn't possibly feel.
Your mind is storm tossed and dreams turn to constant nightmare of past grief - women screaming, men yelling, blood trickling down a chest, whiskey burning its way down your throat. And, if that wasn't enough, your future lays itself out like red-hot railway tracks thrumming with inevitability - you see yourself arrested for rape, or murder, and you know that it is not true but after so long dreams become a reality unto themselves and the only way you can comfort yourself is by saying that before any of this happened you would die. You'd do it - the cancerous thought.
There's no blinding flash of realisation - the knowledge seeps like winesotted logic. There never was anyone for you. Your friends like who you show them, the family loves an idea, and you, solely, know the full truth and despair. And you rage. Your claw pulses black and grows strong and strikes plaster and concrete and wood and glass and gets unstoppable - you rage and scream at the mirror, you catch the black staring at you in an unexpected glance. And it is too much. You know, now, at the end, that it will never go away - that you have fallen too far.
And it burns. And it will always burn. You harden, you lash out, you know it.
This is how it feels. Forever.
|
