Fiction (?): Skin

I’m backed into the damned corner. Again. Not a physical corner formed by the union of two solid walls. The place in my mind, it’s a black dusty mine that waits for a gap in my happiness so I might fall into it. Haplessly, I do arms around my knees and head tucked in. My sooty lungs press hard against rib cages not built to take the rpm of my beating heart.

I am not nice. I do not belong the name “Mia”. I am not the scarred brown skin that thinly veils my continued existence. I am not the tentative smile centered by two brown eyes.

I am a dark night dappled in stars, covered in howling wind and cold rain like hard fingers.

Sometimes I am the words I read, the shows I watch, a part of a far flung community of inside jokes.

Mostly though, i am the banshee heralding my own demise. That wretched woman who screams and screams that falls on deaf ears of the living. The things she knows about the all things she does not, insanity. Wailing wailing waling, unnoticed by passersby caught up in their own affairs. 

i … i am lost among people who love me. i, who know not how to pull off the leaches that suck the light out of me, surely do not deserve that warmth nor can carry that weight of it.

There is a silent horror that lives behind the eyes of the tortured, i’ve come to know. It’s masked by a habitual tiredness.

Horror birthed from dark seeds, physical and mental trauma are it’s famous progeny. Little fears of mundane objects is the stealthy child.