GAME

He knows it.
I know it too.

It's only a game. But she doesn't see it
That way.
I know now. He knows now, I guess.
But our thoughts were caged – we hadn't learnt how to pick the locks yet.
So we couldn't realise.
I know how that sounds.
These excuses are so easy, like what we did. But what she went through was so hard.
She nearly died.

That push – or was it pull? – seemed so comical at the time.
I heard the way she gasped and clawed
At us – her face expressionless.
Cold agony.
There's one thing I remember, before she fell:
A daisy was in her hair.
Lodged through her lilac hairband.
Put there by another girl, her, but different.
She's different when we're not there.
We change her.
Make her a mouse.

Occasionally I scream inside at the taunts circling my head, those angry memories.
I just can't believe it – if there's one thing I still maintain, it is that I am not a torturer.

But I was a child, and I was tempted.
But my tempter will not be my scapegoat.
One day, I'll learn how to undo that
Horrifying scrabble of nails on wet rock.

She'll never forgive me.

But turquoise streams fall, endless,
Into caverns that are as bottomless as her eyes.
When the ground rises up to meet those tears,
She'll turn her back on the past, on her old self, on us.
And I hope she'll forget.
Because god knows,
I can't.