by Amber Burnett

The words rang in the air and there was a smile on my face. The smile is forced, cue the walking. Walking upright, proper, jagged, dead. I hate you so much, and yet you’re still making my heart race. And so, hours later, the words ring in my ears and I sit in the dark gripping a wine glass filled with coke too tight and crying though misty, incoherent grey eyes. One solitary beam of light filters through the blackout curtain not-quite-covering a thin strip of window, and my grip finally pressures the glass to surrender.

Destruction in glittering shards falls haphazardly to the ground. Small insignificant rainbows fly in every direction and the world is dark except that pitter patter of showering glass like falling rain; and broken dreams seem like a walk in the park compared to this. Dimly, the tears are recognized as they drip faster and faster from salty bleeding eyes and time seems to slow, the steady tick tock bang of the grandfather clock a low throb in the dark recesses of the brain.

Thud, thump. Thud, thump. Gasp, wheeze, choke on stale cyanide air and pray to whatever is up above that you will live, because life is lowered to the standard of a beggar when nothing is seen but never-ending black and glistening shards of rainbow paper weights. Time is tired, sleep is fleeting, and I am still unseeing. Dark detached cries rip from a throat, raw and hoarse, and pretty crimson drips happily to join the cascading tears and pitter patter pitter patter it goes. Steady beat inclining and crescendoing against the thud, thump, thud, thump of a broken, black muscle that still pumps air and dusty cobwebs through this decayed, lifeless chest.

Days later I see you and you make me sick. You’re laughing and smiling and joking with people I once held as comrades in my heart, and it simply maddens me. Cue the confrontation, enter stage left. What a tragic act, as men are but fools on a stage. Arguments eat at my brain, snap, snap, electric pulse. Then the storm breaks—and I finally see the funny side of it all.

A laugh is what bugs you most. The humorless, barking, dry sound of a destroyed shell of a corpse lying at your feet is what you hear. The void without emotion or care anymore; it’s what I’ve become and you know it’s all for you that the pretty face isn’t so fucking pretty on the inside. And the inside died long ago with the pretty flowers and cherry chocolates and sweet nothings whispered through thick twilight memories. Creativity was lost in a sea of bruises and broken bones and no longer can I feel afraid of what the world has to offer because you don’t realize that you were my world. You were my everything, my nothing, my sadness, my happy, my pain, my sickness, my health, all in one. And the pretty paper heart told me you cared.

But the pretty paper heart isn’t real. And neither are you. So stop fucking with the head of the dead and pick on someone worth living.