#tinta--writes

The mirror plays me a horror film - reflects to me a reality I wish I could tear from my chest. Tear out the tumours and let them drain out onto the floor; tell the mirror that this is the correct version of reality. This is how the story was supposed to go. My hair would not be a pencilled stubble, and my jaw would be strong - both in wit and in form. I would be tall and wonderfully powerful, my body a dependable pillar of shape and muscle. Of manhood and reality. Not this. Not this broken prison - this flimsy cage that bends too far inwards and then back out again, built for a job it will never come to complete. This body is a lie, and I tell it to everyone I see. Because they love the lie, and why would I take that away?

In another world, parallel yet different, my voice would be beautifully gravelly, full of deep, rich tones that would never come out forced nor jilted. It would sound like a deep music, all bass notes and spoken cello. But I’m a grating violin on a good day - whispering flute, squawking trumpet - I’m all the wrong shapes and sizes and noises. I yelp and it’s a squeal, I laugh and it’s a giggle. My eyes are soft and my lips thin, offset only by a large nose that resembles that of the father that beat me. The same eyebrows, a reflection of him - the only masculinity within me and it reminds me only of pain and fear and anger. I used to want to cut it off, too.

I’m magnetic - hypnotic - I bring you close, into my orbit, and pull your gravity into mine. Closer, closer, unbearably so until every breath you take is an exhale of mine. Loop, waltz, pace and circle like an eagle - dancer - whatever suits your fancy. My fancy. My mood; a dictator putting forth slogans the way I put forth façades.

I’m magnetic - a fragment that tugs, wrenches, and then tears because too much, too fast - doomed to fall apart. The future is a rose and I rip her petals away, down to the thorns, audacity and anger in the same three moves. Magnetise, hypnotise, monopolise.

I’m magnetic - you love me because you have no choice. You’re addicted and I step in turn, always forward, only stuttering back when I lose. Lose against the sweltering, squamous thing in my head. The thing that tells me to erase you from my reality. The thing that tells me I’m safer alone - better alone. Because alone I am everything. Beside you: nothing.

I’m magnetic - easy to talk to, easy to adore. Easy to pick apart and vivisect - made to watch, even comment on, the atrocity you don’t know you are committing. I watch you pick pick pick off the skin, examine the bone before cracking through to the marrow. You tell me it’s beautiful. I preen despite it all.

I’m magnetic - you’ll get bored because I didn’t retain enough. I didn’t try hard enough and now you’re leaving and who I was with you is leaving and I’m leaving and I’m gone. Enough died in my arms because I did not adore her. Enough died and I watched it happen. Enough died and the hilt was in my hand.

Bleeding heart, they’d said, and you hadn’t taken them seriously. “Sure, just sputtering,” you’d dismissed; waved away, and gotten on. Bleeding heart, they’d admitted in your arms, challenging you to drop them. You didn’t, but in retrospect, you wish you had. But you’d stuffed that heart back inside their chest, back into yours, and you’d scrambled off into infinity, letting them chase the trail of blood.

Because caring is like exposing your ribs, wrenching them apart, and asking someone to rummage around inside. And you’re too smart to care. It took you embarrassingly long to realise, but there’s liberation in enlightenment. You’re liberated, cold, besieged no longer by the poison of care.

So when they asked for your help, pulled apart their ribs for you, you’d chastised them for their mistake before reaching inside. This time, the heart comes out, you’d thought. Out into the sun to shrivel and die. But yours would stay safe behind your chest, ribs, flesh. Behind a wall of ice so thick it would do no difference to have it wrought in stone or steel. No blood passes in the cold, because you deny that it’s still there, congealed in your aorta, vena cava, arteries, veins. Congealed, because you do not permit it to flow. To bleed.

“It’s for a friend,” and you’d believed them, believed that their heart bled for their friend. You wouldn’t care, but you’d believe. Because you’d understood once, even if now you are but a shell performing actions. A tool. Indestructible.

They taunt me sometimes, the rotten tongues stuffed between my teeth,

One dressed in green and red, the other crimson and canary.

Flakes of their atrophied muscle fall away, down my gullet,

Lost forever in the pits of my existence.

I choke the words out sometimes, in the silence, and they stick to my gums,

They cling and refuse to live, dead before I’d even thought them.

I can make all the noises perfectly, every last one,

Zhen throws you a look, and you turn away, unable to believe how positively adoring it is - do they have no shame? Undeterred, they worm their hand into yours, and you barely resist the urge to snatch it away. Instead, you blister them so, “It’s been four years.” A hurt silence, then, “I missed you,” there’s a weight to those words, and you cannot find comfort in that. “So much.” You would ask them why, but you already know. Practically joined at the hip, an inseparable team, of course they had missed you. Heck, even seeing their face again made your chest hurt, and you’d always been the stoic one.

“So, what happened there?” Zhen throws your arm a pointed frown, disapproval - and deeper, worry - unmasked as they appraise the naked wiring and scraped plating. “You saw,” This time, the hurt is a flinch across their face, “Wait, your skin-?” You nod, “Burned off, most likely. Or ripped off. I wasn’t conscious for most of it.” “Four years…” but it does not mask the unabashed horror on their face, neither that nor the hand they place in front of their eyes. Zhen’s voice comes out watery, “How does it even still work?” “Shopped it using spare parts and a little help,” you shrug, avoiding the melting brown of their eyes, the waver in their breath. “It’s more or less functional now.”

They choose to stay quiet, to your relief, but you offer their hand a squeeze all the same. You know you would’ve appreciated it had they been the one to disappear instead. Around you, the town appears to offer you space - Tumelo does not try to check on you, nor does his mother interrupt you as the two of you walk. Evening turns the distant, flat horizon into a warbling mess of reds, oranges, and dusty browns. No clinically white lights, bleaching Zhen’s skin and turning yours to ivory - just the sun trying to peer over the fractured landscape. A small mercy, to see no Arenas towering over the skyline, the hulking masses inside stirring and stamping. No. You shake your head.

“Something on your mind?” “Gladiators,” you spit the word out despite yourself, not knowing any better. Something close to pity - though it tastes of despair - flashes across Zhen’s face. “Why didn’t you come back?” their voice is small, and you cannot help the guilt. “Why the fuck would I have wanted to do that?” you disguise it with irritation, “Do you have any idea- do you even know what that fall felt like? Can you even begin to imagine what it’s like to plummet that far and still be able to stand after?” you get louder, you can’t stop. “Did you ever consider that you weren’t worth the pain of coming back? That I valued my mind enough to not put myself through that shit again? Did you ever fucking think, Zhen?” Your hand had left theirs as you’d stepped away, feeling betrayed despite having no reason. No right.

Vivisect me. If you want the truth, vivisect me. Pick apart every little piece - tendons, muscle, bone, whatever it is you wish to see. Pick it all apart in your attempt to find me. Because I’m in here, somewhere.

Manage the scalpel however you wish - I won’t be fussed either way. I’m a stream of thoughts - a consciousness wrapped in flesh - I don’t mind you taking a gander through my being. My existence. Can you bring yourself to understand, or will you plant the rosary in my lungs. Will you put the cross in my stomach, blow apart my sternum with a prayer and lay the body of christ in my chest.