[DDD | 061 | Life] This is the life I live.
She holds him close and she cries. She lets out all the pent up anger, the sadness, the bitter taste of failure, the despair and frustration, the utter helplessness that she's learned to deal with. It comes as a flood and she can't even try to hide it as sobs wrack her body. So her fingers tighten, close on his shoulders and then her arms wrap around him and she buries her head against his chest, letting it all go. She can't help the burning streak of shame and disappointment that seems to be her mind's automatic response anytime she exposes the cracks in her. The broken pieces that make up so much of her now.
Sometimes she thinks that's all she is - broken pieces cobbled back into shape and held together by a tentative plaster of blind arrogance and fading willpower. Sometimes she feels herself slipping further and further away from who she used to be and it scares her. Not because she's changing, but because she feels like just as she's climbed out of one hole, she finds another wall waiting for her. Some days she doesn't want to get out of bed at all.
What kind of life is it, really? Selling products and working a cash register, ignoring the strange looks that her bright hair and blue eyes occasionally earn her. She ignores the gnawing in her gut, the tension in her shoulders and the tightness in her chest until it all bursts and she finds herself clinging to the one constant in her ever-changing world, letting it all out in a flood of tears and muted pain.
There are bright spots. Moments she shares with him - just the two of them on the couch together, listening to the drone of the television, the distant rumble of cars and trains, the high whine of a jet far overhead, hands interlaced - they light up the rest of her life like a candle in a dark room. The tangle of limbs and hair and sweat that follows hasty, hurried, frenzied need. The mindless pleasure of letting herself go, the little marks she leaves on his neck and shoulders. Bitter tea in the mornings. It helps to keep her going.
Because the rest of her life is dull and muted. The rest of her life seems to want to drag her down and it's a bit harder to want to get up in the mornings. She used to be someone important. She used to be worth something. She used to be wanted and desired by more than a strange boy with pale hair and an older woman who cries when she thinks no one is there to hear her.
Sometimes she wonders if there will ever be an end.
Sometimes she wonders if it would have been better for her to have died along with her world.