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I lower the veil like a penance. Thin gauze, soaked in sweat and smoke and something older than both, obedience. To live is to bleed for others. My body doesn’t move; it’s already behind me, slumped and gray and rotting, bones gnawed clean by expectation. I drag it anyway.
The thread cinched around my pinky is baby pink, deceptive in its softness. It cuts deep. Double-knotted, like a pact I never signed, a debt I inherited. I pull. It resists.
My spine folds. A knot blooms in my back, vertebrae twisted, swelling like a beast’s hump, monstrous and obscene. Then, rupture. Skin tears. A cactus erupts, wet and thorned and trembling. The monsoon follows. I’m drenched. It hurts. It hurts in the open air.
No one sees it. They only see the veil, and thank me for being polite.
The thread cinched around my pinky is baby pink, deceptive in its softness. It cuts deep. Double-knotted, like a pact I never signed, a debt I inherited. I pull. It resists.
My spine folds. A knot blooms in my back, vertebrae twisted, swelling like a beast’s hump, monstrous and obscene. Then, rupture. Skin tears. A cactus erupts, wet and thorned and trembling. The monsoon follows. I’m drenched. It hurts. It hurts in the open air.
No one sees it. They only see the veil, and thank me for being polite.
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They said ink was forever, but no one told me how it would feel to wear history under your skin, how it brands you not as a person, but as a relic. I want it out. Carve it from me, slice the memory from flesh, gouge each symbol until there is nothing left but blood and the sound of breathing through gritted teeth. Translate every line, every curve and cruel little mark, into agony, a night of reckoning beneath a sky that doesn’t look away.
Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering.
And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage.
So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.
Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering.
And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage.
So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.
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I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look.
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
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I’ve never felt this skin touch air before. It’s pink and raw like fresh meat, like something not meant to see the sun. And here I am, half-naked in a garden that pretends to be Eden, if Eden were lined with thorns and mountain lions instead of angels. The shrubs rustle. I hear it breathing. I know it’s there.
Maybe I made it up. Maybe the fear is its own beast.
Tonight, sleep will come with teeth. That I know. You can’t talk to nightmares the way you talk to people, there’s no bargaining, no clever arguments. Just blood and the echo of screams.
There's a cartouche on my wall, etched in gold and dust, staring back at me like a curse I forgot I summoned. I think it’s watching. I think it knows. And where the fuck is my shoe? I had it a second ago. It’s absurd, isn’t it? That I’m thinking about footwear while being hunted?
It moves. I move faster.
There’s a crunch. A scream, mine, maybe. Or maybe the thing’s.
I look down. Under my Converse, something’s twitching. Then it’s not. Just a smear, just a stain.
I’ve killed it. I think. I hope.
And I wonder, briefly, stupidly, would Mother Gaia forgive me for snuffing a life because it frightened me? Because it was inconvenient? Because it was there?
Probably not. But it’s dead all the same.
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For a man who follows his heart can never be weak. That’s what I used to believe, once, before the bodies piled up like autumn leaves, and belief curdled into something thinner than blood.
I caught the whistle player once, a man stitched together by calluses and riddles. His tune wasn’t music; it was a wound dressed in melody. It scraped something raw inside me. A song of mystery, yes, but also of cruelty, a tune without mercy. When I asked him how he knew such things, he only laughed. Said the desert had taught him.
Said that Mother Gaia, if she ever existed, didn’t whisper. She screamed. Through the grains of sand, she dragged him down, ankle-first, bone-deep, until he touched her molten heart. Said he came back remade, not better, just aware.
"Men," he spat, as if the word itself offended him, "have always been the destroyers."
Not gods. Not fate. Not even history. Men.
And I realized then: this isn't about nations or borders or wars. It’s about the individual. The one who chooses to light the match. The one who watches the blaze.
It is the gender.
It is the myth we wrote in our own image, thinking ourselves gods, when all we ever were, are, was ruin.
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I knew this love of mine was tired. Not the kind of tired that sleeps, but the kind that floats, listless and unmoored, like a feather dislodged in a storm. It drifted upward, aimless, circling, caught in the breath of things that once felt steady: laughter, warmth, the scent of jasmine from my grandmother’s porch before the war of illness took her away. Joyful people are rarely light. The ones who care the most often carry the heaviest sorrow, but they smile, because someone has to.
I understood this, too late, maybe, as the weight settled on my back like wet wool. I stood by the grave, the earth soft beneath me, and felt my heels sink into the mud. Ruined, cheap patent leather borrowed from my mother, now darkened with soil. She should have been angry. On any other day, she might have been. But not this time.
There was no room for anger. Only silence, shared between women who have known the quiet violence of duty.
I understood this, too late, maybe, as the weight settled on my back like wet wool. I stood by the grave, the earth soft beneath me, and felt my heels sink into the mud. Ruined, cheap patent leather borrowed from my mother, now darkened with soil. She should have been angry. On any other day, she might have been. But not this time.
There was no room for anger. Only silence, shared between women who have known the quiet violence of duty.
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Last night, I dreamed, though I can’t tell you what of, not exactly. There were fragments. A lawn, half-mown, or cats, dozens of them, maybe. Their shapes flicker now at the edge of memory, insubstantial. That’s how it always goes. I dream every night, I know this, but each one slips through my fingers by morning, evaporating like steam before I can grasp it.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle.
I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them, the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they?
But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much.
Still. Maybe I’ll try.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle.
I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them, the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they?
But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much.
Still. Maybe I’ll try.