#creative creature

We are damaged products, traded between people like old jewelry. Fainted diamonds glistening in our eyes. Filthy specks of life that are haunting us on our skin. The older we get, the less potential we see in ourselves to be beautiful. Waiting for someone to see the past we hold, the future we can promise. The price is high, the promise is fragile.

In my life, I saw a lot to be expensive—the friends I couldn't afford and the ones that put up with me—but never myself. In my eyes, I was a beaded necklace made on a sunny day in kindergarten. Looked over as a piece of the past, haunted by childhood memories. On my little sparkling stones were letters. Forming words I'd rather forget. Actions that I regret. Decisions I wanna change. A time I wanna undo.

On my thread is a locket filled with too many pictures, loosely hanging from my neck, threatening to fall off any second. Worn too often. Torn apart over time but put back together every single time the beads fell to the ground, making a crashing sounds that only the people that were close enough could hear.

Though my door was always locked, my head filled with myself until it made me throw up. Chased by dreams, swelling in melancholy that build up over the years.

I feel like a fire burning out for all my life, never having someone willing to spark me up again.

Playing Romance

The lights are low. The TV is burning my eyes as a high pitched female voice is screaming through a kitchen by the French riviera into my living room. I didn't listen close enough to follow her sailors mouth and now she's already too far gone for me to catch up if I wanted to. My feet are propped up on the coffee table and when the keys turn in the lock of the front door I don't think about turning down the volume.

He steps inside and together with the dirt from his shoe soles he brings in a presence that I can't get myself to look at. A figure that I know by heart that now it felt unnecessary to look out for.

There are pictures missing, I decide. Staring at the white wall in front of me that seemed more interesting than the man trotting from the hall to the kitchen and back out. There are pictures missing. Pictures we never took together.

My body is safely tucked away in the blanket he uses to sleep with. Though safety is a fragile little thing and in the blink of an eye a shiver runs down my spine. A cold wind flies through the room as if to check whether I'm still alive, and for a second I question that myself. How far gone is my mind already? Where does my body end and soul start and where in between those two was my mind? If it was right in the middle, wouldn't I feel it all the same amount? If it was in the middle, why does my body feel so far away when I try to move it?

I breath in deeply, swallowing the air like water. It's dripping down my lungs, slowly filling my insides, relieving its thirst.

I'm thirsty for life. A life I can't even make up in my own head.

Everything is easier up there: the lies that I tell myself seem less sinful, the stuff I pretend to like to make things easier for the both of us, his love that I can barely bare to carry around with me. But this life—the one I so desperately crave—it's unreachable. Too far away for me to reach yet so clear for me to see. I try to make it up on nights when I can't sleep. Stop motion pictures playing on the black of my eyelids or on the ceiling. When his arms around my body until he grows cold of my skin and saves himself from the endless winter running through my blood by turning away.

No amount of make pretend could make the unshed tears well up in my eyes and flow like a river down my face. That, whatever soul is currently eating me up, isn't mine but from somewhere far away. If it was mine then I would be able to love him like I once have.

He pushes his shoes out of the way as he walks back into the hall. Fiddling with his keys, dropping them in the bowl next to mine. Dust pushing itself off of the metal and on his fingertips. The loud music from his headphones fades as he unplugs them from his phone. Pretending like he wouldn't want to keep them in just to disappear from reality for a moment longer. The kiss that felt too polite to mean more than a greeting was barely a stray as his lips brushed my head. Vanishing into the kitchen, the light from the fridge makes my eyes squint as he searches for something to still his hunger like I never could. The room is silent though his thoughts are clear: Another day done nothing. Another day wasted on the couch. Another uneaten breakfast left standing on the counter.

He doesn't dare to say those words but I sometimes catch him mumbling similar ones on the phone or at night when he's sitting on the edge of the bed we share, looking out the window he refuses to close. I curse myself for it every time I hear him betraying the promises he made when the sun was still shining down on us, but I can't blame him. He is a shiny, new gold ring. Left untouched by the jeweler. Looked at by many but never bought. So he set himself to sale, hoping for at least one poor soul to find his price attractive.

My eyes drift over to his frame hunched over. His shirt fits tighter around his arms now, the black fabric comforts me somehow. It's the same one I bought him a while ago. The fridge door closes with a loud sound and sighs of frustration. Whether it was from the lack of food or my behavior, I couldn't tell. Looking away when his body turns towards me, like he was a star I couldn't get myself to be caught looking at. As if, that when I look into his I would turn to stone. Averting my eyes from his, I turn back to the white wall.

"You should do something with your time," he tells me from the kitchen.

I want to argue. Tell him that I do something and that he only doesn't notice because he's always gone for work. Though that would be a lie I know he was able to look through like it was made out of glass. So I don't argue. I don't say anything to him. My eyes darken in knowing and my body makes itself smaller in hope of hiding from his burning gaze.

"You can't just sit here all your life." It wasn't meant as a threat but to me it felt like one. He would throw me out at some point. The childish nostalgia of beads and fake diamonds fading into maturity and then I would be nothing but a memory in a shoebox pushed beneath his childhood bed together with stuffed animals and teenage magazines.

Shadows appear in the middle of the chaos, unmoved by the strange behavior of nature. They're dancing around each other, never touching. Moving like ghosts, floating in the air like smoke. Nothing could bring them together neither rip them apart. They were one while not being together. They were searching while ignoring what was in front of them.

For a moment it was quiet, silence stretching along the waterline, then humming started. They were singing. One melody, different keys.

I close my eyes, drifting off into nothingness. Listening to the sweet melody, bathing in the familiarity of it all. My body disconnects from by mind before consciousness comes over me again.

I am falling.

My body moves upwards.

My feet are in the air.

The cliff beneath my feet is gone and now I'm being carried by the wind.

I am floating just like the figures.

I go higher and higher until my head dips into the water, swallowing my whole body at last. It wasn't cold but it wasn't warm either. It felt like nothing. Blue turns into black in front of me, coming nearer with every moment but I don't feel the water. I can breath.

Two dots appear. Two glowing, orange dots in the middle of nothing. They disappear before returning. Repeating the choreographed game of hide and seek as I'm being sucked further down.

On the ground, grass is growing. Long ivy plants are scattered all over the place, hiding whatever hides beneath it. They were braided together like flower crowns we used to make in kindergarten. And in the middle of it all were two glowing eyes looking up at me, enchanting my soul with its secret. Whispering something that I can't understand. A foreign language that I haven't yet learned.

It was him. Scolding me. Telling me to run.

Water filled my lungs. How could I run from him? I don't think I am where he is, I am further down the west coast in a long forgotten bedroom with grey walls and tossed bedsheets that stayed undone for days on end. Splattered glass from broken windows scattered all over the floor, cutting whoever dared to take a step towards the exit. The wind outside tossed the waves against the shore up to the hill where we resigned and my feet washed blood into the ocean as the tide takes me down the dunes and to the iceberg waiting to be crushed. My skull was waiting to be crushed by it too.