slowly sinking, wasting { mylee }

[✨ zozo.]

ramona valentine.

I leave the house at the first hint of sunrise with nowhere to go and a fist full of anger, fresh wounds bleeding scarlet down the gaps between my fingers and smears of blood staining the brick wall outside. Knuckles torn from white to pink to red, I follow my heart and let my feet carry me wherever my feelings take me.

Sneakers kick up dusty roads, worn-through and faded to a pale mauve where my once-violet feet would dance through the green grass of spring. In those days I had nothing to worry about except coming home before the sun had set and wondering whether or not it would rain. Then came the possibilities that followed chasing the other girls through the streets and wondering why my heart jolted when their hands caught mine. When they fell over, they didn't cry. Concern turned to anguish at my tears day after day after day, when they scoffed at why I sobbed at broken skin and rattled bones and purple bruises painted on my skin. We're just playing, they laughed as I hit the concrete below. You'll get better.

When it rained, I imagined the smell of it on the tar-coated roads and the taste of their lips on mine.

In a backpack containing 3 boxes of baked goods, 8 sticks of bubblegum, a toothbrush and a pink bandanna, my new home was born from within. I hadn't wanted to run away. It was like tearing my skin off piece by piece. But I had to, despite the salt-stained skin that I awoke to after the floods had washed away my old life the previous night. Something about those walls had told me that if I had stayed a night longer, I wouldn't wake up again.

Ghosts of hands shoving me backwards still linger against my skin. If I close my eyes I can hear them laughing. I can hear my father screaming the day I came home with cherry gloss on my lips that didn't belong to me. The others just watched silently. I spent the night on the roof, throwing the woven bracelet she had given me into the neighbours garden and violently rubbing away the sticky red liquid on the back of my hand.

The hole in the dining room wall is still there. I patch the one up in my heart and sit down on the sidewalk to wash away the blood trailing down my arm and leaving a trail back home - and then realise that I don't have one anymore. Fear of that place, of those people who called themselves my parents, has long gone. But fear of the unknown ahead on my spontaneous, uncertain trail grips my throat tightly. The sun hits the highest point in the sky and sweat drips from my forehead to the scorching ground below.

Band aid in hand, heart in my throat, salt city erupts in my eyes.

[Deleted]

kaijsa.

My mother would tell me that I was a fighter— but she would never tell me what I was fighting for.

Sometimes I would pretend it was a castle, a throne, another morning during which I did not hear her choking on what little air was caught between the dense walls of this home. These were the mornings that I was reminded that there is no point in fighting a losing battle— the war wouldn’t be won, anyway. She was a martyr for hope, for never waving the white flag of surrender until you had stained it with your own blood.

I watched her paint the walls red only to bury her in the white flag of surrender.

Goddamn, I would never be a fighter for purity.

Instead, I found a battleground in place of her graveyard; her sword resting against her own tombstone engraving what little of a description could be left behind about a woman whose name was defined by contradictions. She was a saint for the lost church, a religion still dying yet she had left her commandments upon my shoulders, laid the weight of her sins upon my chest and pretended that she could not hear my pray on the nights that I feel forsaken enough to do so.

My father tells me that I am skirting the ideas of revival— but he never tells me what I will be bringing back to see this world so dismal.

This would be sin not epiphany.

Sometimes I pretend it is a hymnal, a mother, the fire that burned within my chest when she told me that I was fighting for something far greater than what my range of understanding would allow. When I strike, I strike blindly.

Irrationality and fear sit well within the same palm.

I only visit her grave on the days that I pray, and I do not pray to anyone in particular. I do not believe in something greater than the ground beneath my feet— blind faith in the unseen is a burden not a blessing. At least I had placed prior hope in a heart I could touch.

This morning, when I had knelt at the window and knocked my knees against the wooden floor I did not pray for peace, not for comfort or purity or the hope she once brandished at her hip— this morning, I had pressed my palms together in prayer, yet I did not send a call out for a ceasefire to this calamity, no, instead I had promised myself that I would lay her sins upon her own tombstone like an offering— I will not carry a burden upon frail shoulders any longer.

My mother would tell me that I was a fighter— but never would she tell me I had already won the war.

When I leave her tombstone with bones that ache at the feeling of lightness I step carefully, softly, tentatively, like this body of mine might break now that it does not understand what it means to not have sin sewn within my skin like a signature.

I am looking for a name not my own.

When I see her, unnamed, unmarked— a battle not yet fought— I wonder if she knows what it means to be enlisted. When I sit beside her— troubled, emptied— I remind myself that I am a fighter, and that what I am fighting for has not been determined.

“Shit day? I’ve had a few of my own, and I’ll tell you this, they always seem to get worse.”