↨ mired in these thoughts of mine ȴ

to the gathering shadows she says
“I will conquer you”
while secretly she wishes
for many lifetimes not her own

✖ and amongst the stars i'm finally home

“You could be great, you know,” someone once told her as the day faded to dusk. “If only you put your mind to it.”

She salvages this notion and files it to the back of her mind, wedged between the how to make coffee and remember to brush your teeth section. It’s not particularly important, she decides, a jest without meaning. Being great is not a priority, rather an opinion of status. Whose opinion? she wonders idly, fingers brushing the steel of her heart.

She is mediocre. That is her conclusion. Although mediocre is such a pretty word. Safe, too. Mediocrity can be measured in words, and it can be criticised and chided. It is a haven, really, if she thinks about it—to be mediocre means one has not yet achieved their potential. With this evaluation, she does not worry about greatness. It is unequivocally an impossible feat, an out of reach star, past science and dreaming.

Tap, tap, tap. If it weren’t for this constant and incurable boredom, perhaps her mind wouldn’t drift to things that really shouldn’t be her concern. She busies herself to forget, to forget how unsatisfactorily she lives. Although, she concludes, unsatisfactory is really just a negative reflection of satisfaction. Its purpose is to negate the latter word. It does not exist on its own principle. This thought brings fleeting comfort, elusive like the winter air. If satisfaction is brought, then the word loses its meaning. And she is still young, barely a woman, on the cusp of adulthood—she has a long path to walk. In her own time—an age-old mantra—in her own time she will truly live.

Of course nobody can achieve perfection. It would be silly to hypothesise otherwise. She devotes her time to rhymes. Hy-po-the-sise. Four syllables. A curious word, if there ever was one. Scientific, and yet could also be considered philosophically. She lets this hypothesis carry her away on its own ethers, lost in a current too big for her to imagine. She has no ties to the earth, an angel of her own making. Maybe I’ll give myself grey wings, rather than white.

It always seemed like such a practical solution, in retrospect. Fly to the stars and make yourself at home. There you could be peaceful. Flaring out of existence with the brightest of calls, spiralling across the universe. But millions of years into the future, of course. She would not have to worry.

You could be great, you know. And she reaches the answer that she does not want to be. It is a vast, ambiguous word used in so many instances. She does not want to be branded, marked out. She will remain unbound by words, measured by mediocrity, and flying towards a distant future. A starry sky. It really is poetry, she giggles to herself.

I don’t need saving.

✖ my back now faces the sunset

“Where do you think you’re going?”

The question throws her off guard, due to the seriousness with which it is asked.

“The balcony?” she suggests, as if it is still a topic under debate. Unsureness, she observes, has been said to be polite in some circles. And submissive in others, she supposes.

“Here,” he gestures to the spot she vacated moments prior. The blush is visible even from this distance, a noted fact that causes her heart to engage in sudden calisthenics. “I want you here.”

“How much would you say you wanted?” she crosses the landing, curious. Their conversations are often awkward, often filling up space when the both of them realise the nature of their relationship does not progress.

“You?” there is a light smirk, a quirk of the eyebrow. She has come to love his expressions, cataloguing them meticulously and analysing each one. Sub-consciously, she thinks, she may know him better than he would guess.

“Anything at all, ever,” she feels like dancing. It’s a strange thought without plausible or logical explanation. It comes at her suddenly, as if in hiding.

“…I never thought about it.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Well. I’m not one for the internal debates.”

“How boring a life you must lead,” her tone is light, mocking, a little truthful. This is perhaps the reason for their division. Businessman—simple, successful, pragmatic. And her. She encompasses everything she ever has been and will be. She is an amazing conundrum, in her own personal opinion, as she changes so often she can rarely figure herself out.

“Maybe to you.”

“Mhm.” Twirl, pirouette, waltz. One, two, three. Repeat. Rhythm is key.

“Come on,” the gesture is slightly more impatient, and he no longer tests the waters. She wishes to comply, a delicate surrender—but she has never really been that type of person.

“Do you believe in stories?”

“What kinds of stories?”

“Not the newspaper. Not factual. In general.”

His brows furrow, and already she knows the answer. “I don’t—”

—care about the imaginary—

“—ever really think about it.”

—and you’re hardly real to me.

“Magic?” she hazards. Love?

He grimaces. “You’re silly. Now, come, back to bed with you.”

She obliges, if only to disguise the sound of her heart breaking.

If this world is really as superficial as it seems—

—why would I want to live in it?

She will forge her own path.

✖ the world will swallow me whole

She likes the universe most when it’s spinning. Most people dislike loss of control. They fumble and grope endlessly at power, as if being powerless will lead to oblivion. And perhaps it does, for those who are normal. But she prides herself on being rather abnormal—another of those words that negates the first—and so doesn’t mind sacrificing power for dizziness.

When she is dizzy, she manages to forget. Forget what, exactly, is the blurry part of the image. She has spent so much time and effort on forgetting that she has forgotten other memories, too. It is all simply fiction to her; the tale of her life from there to then to now.

I am—

—I am—

—somebody. But… if I become nothing, will I be nobody? Or is that impossible?

It sounds nice. To be nobody. No responsibility or expectation—no weights or ties to the bitter harshness of what’s real. She considers the possibility. She would not have earthly worries or obligations, and she would never hurt. She would have no reason to hurt, because there would be no one to pour salt on the open wounds.

She grasps the bottle of pills in one hand, and the sink in the other. The water is washing down down down—washing away the vomit. The sickness is an inevitable after-effect of the pills. They are nice, but temporary. They are nice, but dangerous. She concludes that there is nothing just nice in the world. There are hidden depths and darknesses to everything.

The bottle tumbles from her hand, falling with a clatter. She grimaces, looking in the mirror. It is here that she is real. It is her only assurance that she still exists, and that she’s not fast fading away. Her face is laced with sweat, and her eyes are unfocused, and her hair is matted and sticky. But she is real. She is something, and not nobody, and it is only this that matters.

She wonders if she will ever be granted the wish of disappearing.

✖ this is how i break when i finally hit the ground

When they have sex, it is without much fanfare or preamble. He is eternally busy and rushing through life, never pausing to consider emotions or anything outside the religion of pragmatism. There is no fumbling or passion or fire. It is a procedure that has been repeated too many times for her to slip up, and it is formulaic in its execution.

She lies next to him, a few millimetres from touching, because she knows he dislikes it. She will wait until he falls asleep, gather her things, and disappear back to her one-bedroom apartment. She will be systematic and unemotional. Shower, breakfast, brushing teeth and hair, shoes. And then she will go the corner café and work her double shift. She will come home alone, undress in the darkness and climb into the bed with the too-thin sheets and lie awake in the place that has never felt like home to her. She will not see him for a week or two, and when she does it will only be for another of their formulaic trysts. There will be no candlelit dinners or walks in the park. He has an image to uphold, after all. A relationship with a girl from the slums of the city is considered to be unsavoury and scandalous.

She stares at the ceiling, listening to his steady breathing pattern, and wondering how they met. How he had decided he would make her his. Why she lived this life without question. But she already had an answer to this one. She was terrified of being alone completely, and she clung to these brief nights they had together because it was the only tie to the world she had. And if she let go—

But isn’t that what I want? To let go?

She was unsettled, and shifted, turning her face sideways. The clock read 4:05am. She had another hour before time would become an issue. It was only on Sundays that he sought her out, because he would sleep until midday. She worked six days a week including Sundays, but he disregarded it. Subsistence-level work, he always said. They demand unfair hours by default.

“What are you thinking?” he asks her suddenly, breaking the sacred silence that lies between them like a chasm.

“I’m thinking about us,” she says levelly, letting her fingers slide along the silk sheets. It’s not often she is allowed this kind of luxury, and she decides impulsively she will appreciate it more than she usually is able to.

“You should sleep,” he suggests evasively, because he hates the label. ‘Us’, like they were really more than just two people who sometimes stumbled into each other’s lives. Which, she decides, they aren’t. They can’t be.

“I have to go,” she replies, sitting up and suddenly feeling as if she is going to faint. She has never left while he was still awake. It has always been quiet, secret, timid; as if she is unsure whether or not she is allowed.

“Stay awhile,” he goes to reach her arm, but she moves to grab her dress and shakes her head firmly.

“I’m leaving.”

It has many more meanings than just one, she knows. She can feel it in her shaking limbs and the pounding of her heart—and her heart is really only just fragments now. He has broken it many more times than she cares to remember, and she knows it will never be fixed if she stays. She doesn’t look at him as she dresses, but he isn’t protesting.

“Goodbye,” she says, but she feels as if she is mostly saying it to herself. He does not say a thing as she walks to the door and leaves, moving down the corridor and towards the elevator. He does not come after her, and he does not say even one word to convince her to stay.

She is unsure whether this is for her own benefit or not.

He doesn’t call.

✖ i'm just a girl in a fading world

She sees him in the newspaper with some blonde woman who is all cleavage and legs. They are allegedly business associates, but she knows his expressions too well. She does not pause to think how long they have been together, and if he truly cares for her. She does not pause to think of the article at all. She folds it neatly and places it in the trash, where she feels it belongs.

You could be great, you know.

Someone once told her this. She doesn’t remember who or why, but she remembers the words. She has forgotten too many things to connect the stories in her life together.

You could—

She takes the pills, and swallows ten at once.

—be great—

He comes to her apartment to tell her all the things he had never said, and he finds her dying on the bathroom floor.

—you know.

The ambulance is five seconds too late.

and so maybe her only cure
was to fade away completely
and once again become one with the earth

↨ fin ȴ

A/N: all aboard the angst train? who knows what inspired this sob. there is an accompanying poem which you should find in my profile? and this is all mine, completely mine. i will go very grrr-face if i find out anyone has stolen it or plagiarised, because people should be able to think of their own ideas, right?