Ungrateful child.

It smells of old dust and dampness. Coiled steel, painted horses, the moaning of old springs and pinched flesh. Something crouches sexless and amorphous. A flight of stairs winds too tight, too dark, too narrow for breath to reach. Dissociative rigid amnesiatic. She makes a better doll than a child. She does so little yet whimpers too much, each time her little wrists get smacked and blush! Raised rabid with reptilian survival instincts: they won’t want you if you’re dead meat. Challenge a mute to scream a little louder, and kick her when she chokes. It hurts, but it will grow back. Disconnected intrusive indelible: "unremembered and therefore unforgettable".

Living Death

Some people look for ghosts but don't want to find them.

I am pallid flesh. Sallow. I bear the wound without the injury. I look to it like a glyph in a Dead language. I am rootless and potentially rotten . Hel's lost child. Irrevocably doomed. Immaculately tainted. Haunted. But I am the architect. I put the ghosts in my bones. I gave birth to them, they are a part of me, and I made them a home here. It was me all along. Me, myself, and a cursed lineage. I am not the host but the Queen. I am my own abuser. I am my own Monster. I am and always have been the hungry all-consuming Darkness. I am.

I say I want to die, but I am not sure that Death is what I want. I say I am alive, but I am unconvinced and ambivalent. How might I learn to live when I have only ever been certain of two things: the inevitability of Death and the closeness of it. The closeness intoxicates me. Some people seem to exist closer to her than others, and by no provocation of their own; it is a sweet stench that lingers in still places. Nauseating notes of rot and chrysanthemums might be detected in the quiet moment between a heart beat. Some people are alive but see ghosts because they have been living as one. They are visited by apparitions and are compelled to chase them futilely. An umbilical noose is caught in the branches of Yggdrasil, which has borne only rotten fruit for twenty years. I was a ghost at five weeks. I slept too long and was inseminated by a Death wish. I didn't want to be born. Was I meant to be born? Escape is a little womb in the Earth.