#ragemade

🎁  @ragemade asked santa for a playlist !

        when she was little, fred used to think crying meant letting parts of you pour out: like bleeding — do it too much, you’ll RUN OUT. she wonders now how much of herself has been poured out of her eyes — or how much should’ve been cast out, cleansed from her blood, but was kept stubbornly tucked inside her tear ducts. she wonders, too, if it’s coming all out now because HE’s here: for the way he alone can tug at the exposed wires of her short-circuited remembering, or because her body can sense that he’s the SAFE SPACE in which her freedom takes the shape of WEAKNESS. or fragility — the ability to shatter, knowing one way or another she’ll put herself back together again. 

     “ i’m sorry ”. the apology is INNATE, encoded in her dna — even HIM can do nothing against it. she smiles, embarrassment pouring out with her tears, for he’s been the VICTIM fo her own idiotic choices and yet she still somehow awards herself the LUXURY of crying — foolish, spoiled, selfish. she moves to pull away, excuse herself back to a corner where she won’t have to EXCUSE her sadness, but his touch warms the skin where his fingertips land. FAMILIAR, always, and always excruciating: sometimes she thinks it’s her body BURNING whenever he’s close to remind her of the amputation she performed on herself, when she turned her back on him — a punishment if you will, holes of arrows in her flesh like saints carrying the signs of MARTYRDOM.

    the words die in her throat, then. it’s not DESIRE that clouds her eyes when they’re raised upon him, rather the need to LET IT ALL OUT. she’s a frozen land on the last day of winter, begging for the SUN to melt it back to life — freddie swallows, hard, and all she can do, really, all this AVALANCHE that brews in tears and sobs inside her lungs will let her, is lean so close to him that their foreheads touch, that she can remind herself SPRING has come, at last. “ i missed you so much ”. she won’t stop crying, not for a while — she cries for nothing in particular, and for everything in the world. for the grief etched in her bones, the parts of her that have been BLEEDING for a decade. she cries ‘cause there’s no other language she knows to let this all out, if not screaming, or throwing herself into the OCEAN and hope for tidal waves and thunder. she cries, and in her crying she might drown, but he’s the ANCHOR she desperately holds on to. in hushed whispers, she won’t let go.

   “ i missed you so much ”.

F,

I love you. I always have. I wish I could tell you face to face, but I guess the fear of rejection overcomes and I find myself scared. Me, scared... you’d tell me I’m brave if you knew who this was. You probably already do, but oh well. I wish things between us could work. (Could they? Damnit, I really wish they would.) and it’s okay if it’s not mutual. I’ll go on loving you in my way, doing anything to make sure you stay smiling.

Always yours.

the piece of paper sits in her hand, as heavy as concrete. eyes swollen: she knows exactly who these words belong to, and though it answers the unspoken song she has carried inside her heart for half her life ( a song of desperate longing, of the emptiness around her and the need for a specific body to fill it —— a song of grief, and loss, and the rawest, goriest face of love ) : it hurts as if a blade pierced right through her chest. she has dreamed of this, of course. dreams of their hands, entwined — of the lines of their fates becoming one. of freedom, if people like them even have the luxury to consider it. but dreams, she’s been taught, are the coward’s retreat against reality: and the reality of it is, she would burn him, or the world would. either way, the fate that joines them is one that leads to heartbreak — and he’s perhaps the most precious thing that never belonged to her, the most tender part of her, too: though it can only live outside of her. wiping the trail of her tears, the note is shoved in the pocket of her jacket: out of her sight —— detached, like she could somehow forget it. but above her heart, forever.

     well — what is she supposed to say to that ? 

it hurts. not in the way an unknown truth hurts, when delivered carelessly in the soft spot where the skin’s still tender. this one’s more a festered wound, widespread throughout her body — it’s a finger stuck right inside the bleeding. she’s been BLEEDING about this ever since. she’s pictured that moment a million times, his face twisted in the effort, but not BLAMING him for the violence that then led him to the prison bars, the same violence that was her ticket out of texas. she blames HERSELF for the freedom he gave up, for the blood on his hands, for the way he’s a wanted man now, for the way they’re ALIKE now. 

    “ i’m sorry ”.

she can’t stand to face him, and she fears her own frail, barely balanced nature might just lead her to burst into tears. it’d be bad for business: customers are still hanging around the bar, though she’s barely paying them attention anymore. a towel’s in her right hand but it’s not moving. lifeless, helpless — his words emptying her of all her resolution. 

one day, she’ll be able to pay for this sin of hers. for how she stuck to him like a PARASITE, stole his freedom from him — it’s a quiet comfort she can’t speak to him about, that when the time comes, she’s resolute on making things . it’s just that right now, she can’t face him.

eyes down, her voice dulls to a whisper.

“ i’m sorry, bill. i never wanted to ruin you like that ”.

       and that, right there, is the problem. not one she can verbalize: not because of the years that divide the then and the now, the sacrifice he made for her and the atonement she can’t seem to fulfill; it’s because it is unknown to herself first and foremost, where the need to bleed comes, where the sick, perverse enjoyment of her own self-inflicted violation resides. if she thought he could understand, she’d say it’d be her desire to get hurt, over and over, to lose shreds of herself the way a snake loses its skin, but she wishes to become sand, or less than sand, dust, molecules, nothing. instead she holds her lips in a tight, childlike quiver, and turns away because she knows he can read past the trembling and into the parts of her she never wishes for anyone to see, let alone herself. “ you can’t keep trying to protect me. ” the strings in her voice tighten: too cold, far more harsh than she’d hoped they’d be. it’s natural: he tried to keep her from getting hurt once before, look where that fucking got him. it’s fight or flight, except fighting has never been her thing and it wouldn’t matter, anyway, not when he’s so keen on not wanting to save himself: so she hardens, like a scarred wound growing thicker, anticipating the next blow. “ i never asked you that ”.

answered here ! ♥