Someone like a sister hates me.

We share the same blood, partly.

Someone who had seen me at my worst, seen the best and the truth despite it.

A cousin by it, but by name so much more. To me. Not to her.

She hates me for rumours spread by a friend I considered family, whom I implemented as such. He spoke words I never once said. She believed him— a boy I knew, turned to a baleful, disgusting man by time and genetic material‚— over me, a person who she had loved since babbling English.

And she loathes me. Will not even look at me at family events to the point I excuse myself to cry. To want to die, so maybe then she is forced to remember the baby she once cradled, the little girl she once spent hours upon a chair watching moves with, the couch we lost our breath laughing as we played a video game that was solely ours.

When did she take off those glasses she saw me so purely through?

Will she ever pick them up again?

A grandmothers dying wish,

a mother's quiet expectation.

She does not.

She hates me, and I love her.

Oh, to fall in love with you.

You don't know, not really, that I have.

Of course I revere you. I touch you like you are cut marble, and stare at you like, should it make you happy, I'd happily steal the stars even if it would steal my life.

But I trace the words into your skin, and wait like you might catch on in your hesitance.

I've been in so many relationships, but my breath doesn't come, and my heart stops and redoubles its effort in wait. I've never felt this. You've never loved before. You are as clueless as I.

I listen to your heart, and it speeds up with each scrambling word looped against your warm skin. I listen for something— perhaps the crash of the economy, or the world shifting on its axis.

You just continue to play with my hair, like you were trying to decipher it but couldn't quite. Maybe thought it was moronic scribblings. The world is entirely indifferent to my silent confession.

I have felt love, but haven't been in it, because that would mean whole kindness. Whole knowing. Whole loving. You have only treated me like I am good in spite of myself, while everyone has inflated my flaws so I would suffocate to spite me.

And I hope you catch me, with a scarred heart and scared mind, when you know I've fallen.

There is nothing particularly wrong.

I enjoy my work, I have friends who wish to spend my free time with me,

I have someone who holds me at night, and family that laughs with me over breakfast.

I am healthy.

There. Is. Nothing. Wrong.

So why do I feel like I am falling apart, underneath a layer of something I cannot feel.

But I feel nothing until I am at work, and force myself to be present. I beg my friends to be too tired to remember plans. I wish for my lover to be sickeningly obsessed, and my family was fractured and now scattered, only to come together but never meeting during holidays.

I am sick in my mind. I do not want pills to dilute my feelings anymore. So I feel them wholly, horribly, constantly.

But I cannot tell you what is particularly wrong.

I wish to be infamous.

Not famous, not known by name or face.

But my words— I want them to haunt. To cause people to uproar for more.

To yearn for my pain because it is all I have known, and all I can curate.

I want my writing to be devastating, and notorious for the absolute depravity it causes.

However, I am not. I have tried. I have failed. I keep trying. I continue failing.

Still, I try harder, and fail worse. But I do not give up, because out there is a reflection of myself at thirteen— fat, pale and mute. Traumatized but unable yet to feel the full effect of it. And my words will help. Will guide. Will promise the slightest retribution for the suffering that never will end. Will encourage. Paint the faintest glaze on something torn, bloody and bruised.

I will keep trying until I succeed.

I haven't a thing to write about.

This happens often, where I am at a loss, but feeling so much it becomes moot.

My doctor chastises me for going off my meds, though my therapist notes I felt the same drugged out of my mind as I did without.

And I am loved. I am busy. But I feel nothing, like a thick balm of ointment on an old wound.

I know it is there. It just doesn't hurt unless I look at it.

I see my trauma beyond this veneered wall of pleasant experience.

I feel it, and it aches. It eats at me until I am no longer hungry, and haunts me to exhaustion yet I rest pitifully.

I stare off more times then not, chunks of time gone from my mind where it sits like an inky ball, and I ask it what it wants from me. It never answers. It grins, and feeds, until I am further than numb but unable to process.

I kiss my lover. I laugh with my friends. I work twelve hour days. I ask it what it wants. It bites.

I cry. I isolate in the dark. I call in sick. I ask what it wants. Still, it feeds.

They do not speak of the lingering memories of trauma in happiness.

That thick, greasy film that clings to you out of nowhere,

on a sunny day where you lose your breath laughing.

Because then you are alone— and you feel it.

Like the grit of ash beneath your fingertips, cloying your prints,

or the stick of cough medicine in your throat it takes hours to clear.

I am in love. My love is pure, and unabashed, and innocent.

But in it I am forced to remember grabbing, tugging, taking.

One sticks to me like cling tonight, as I sip on a drink after a long work week.

The memory of someone, so harmful in their brief stint, bragging about a stranger carrying them around at a bar. Hands on their waist, lips ghosting— sickeningly, that saccharine poison of a laugh that I once thought true given to another while I sit at home.

And my love now is out with friends, doing something as harmless as mini golf. And I am bloated with the bitter memory of my tears, my pain, my suffering.

And it was all caused by someone so brief. Not even four months, and yet ever present for the rest of my life. How is that fair? That I mix up the kindest person's name with one so demented? That I remember a touch scraping me raw where my lover's is soft, never straying.

The cut that always bleeds.

I slip my hand beneath her shirt and feel as she gets warmer and warmer with every passing hour. I want to get impossibly closer. I tangle our limbs in a soundless dance, listen to the symphony of her laugh and hums and heart all rhythmically mine.

Her perfume is stronger this way, when I touch her so softly it holds no baring to the rough, taking personalities I've always known. But she's never known this type of lust. She knows only of what I give her.

Tentative hands that brush, but do not claim.

Lips that hesitate out of nerves, not out of foreboding regret.

A body that flushes from every messy, often accidental exploration.

And I want to drown in it. Bathe in the moment, and prune beneath the purity of it all.

She doesn't know yet, but when I flip onto my stomach to look at her- sleepy eyed and soft smiled, I want to tell her I love her.

My face must give it away- because I know I am useless under her unwavering attention.

But she wouldn't know, because she's never known, and everything I give her is her first. It is as unknown to me, my softness and vulnerability, as it is natural to her.

I want to promise her everything she could ever want when she kisses my temple, then chin, then bridge of my nose and corner of my mouth.

Build her a future from empty pockets and sticks.

I want to tell her I am so hopelessly in love with her, but I can't.

Because I've never known a love like this. It's my first too.

She is a piano solo. Quiet, but moving meaningfully.

She doesn't say much, but accommodates my constant moving soundlessly.

I roll over her like an idiot. I lay awkwardly, in a way painful to her.

She just wraps an arm around me and kisses me where she can reach.

She never complains. Never huffs for breath like I weigh a ton.

I nestle closer, and feel her heart beat against my ear- a symphony I wish to record.

She moves purposefully to touch me in any capacity if we're apart for longer than a minute. Her silent verse, to a chorus of loving.

I joke she only looks at me from a side glance, and oh.

She gives me the fraction of the sweetest smile, and flips fully to her side to gaze at me.

Her pupils are blown- iris' glaringly black from her affection.

She offers me the other fraction to that smile- what is this?

I studied music. She did too.

Is she a riff? A melody? What is this moment? A bridge?

I cannot place it.

Her usual laugh is sweet- her guttural laugh is that of the first woman I had imagined a future with.

She had been wrong, and mean.

But she cackles like her.

Grins like my favourite actress, speaks like her own favourite.

She is the soliloquy of those I've loved, and known.

It hurts, soothes, builds all at once.

I don't like to stare too long at myself in the mirror.

I notice the tan lines, and the shrinking of my breasts,

and I turn away.

I do not know what I look for.

Bruises that do not exist. Taut-flesh that hangs loose.

I look for some proof of what I went through.

Scars I was unfamiliar with bubble up years later under scrutiny,

and I curl a lip.

What do I have to show for this?

I know I haven't gained that much weight, or lost that much muscle, and my skin cant truly look this dull so quickly. But I see through funhouse eyes, at a genocidal body.

The moon is split in half tonight.

Straight across her belly, not lengthwise.

She is carved into, as I gaze up through speckled dying leaves and fading clouds. Like empty beer bottles shattering and clouds of smoke disintegrating.

My throat hurts. My head. My heart.

My seatbelt is partially in. It did not buckle.

I think of tea. Cold medicine. Brushed teeth and water.

I wince at the feeling of any of it hitting my smoked bovine flesh.

Raw and supple.

My left hand nestles between fat folds, the right above my hip bone. I gaze at the jagged edge in the moon. Bleary and pale in the way nothing so beautiful should be.

I feel pale.