Paint My Soul

His eyes itch when he sleeps and he can feel bugs crawling under his skin, making home in his blood vessels. There’s fake skies outside, war on the streets of New York. He’s filled with bad mistakes that fill his head and burns. Worse then any supernova, worse then any fire. A pain you cannot feel nor see, but it lingers like ash in air. Bones creak and joints ache, the pads of his fingers are tough and really, they’re the last part of him that’s not broken. His sister assures him that his heart will heal but she also believes CPR works like it does on tv. Six broken ribs and a cracked sternum. Good as new. It’s hard to live as half a monster.

On the day the comet hit, Elijah was driving. There’s a power inside of him that hasn’t taken over yet and the devil made him do it. They’re on the run, all three of them. Laura’s sitting next to him, holding onto a stuffed rabbit like it’s all she’s got and his knuckles are white as he grips onto the wheel. Then there’s light. So much god damn light, it blinds him and the next thing he knows there’s all this water coming in, filling up his lungs — his skin is becoming numb and he’s not thinking of himself but of Laura. Laura. His unborn daughter. Their children.

Two love-sick fools running away to get married. Love is like hunger, it takes over everything until you’re nothing. There’s a fine line between being a hero and a villain. He’s a dead body covered in dead skin, living on borrowed hours, running from his downfall, his disaster. Who’s going to burn this war drum down??

Elijah Olsen is both human and beast, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Maybe because we live in a world where Shakespeare took Juliet first. He’s comatose and she’s six feet under, not deserving of her fate. He should have died instead. But love is filthy. It clogs your shower drain, leaves toothpaste on the kitchen countertop and you find it under your nails when your realize there’s too much laundry for one person.

It’s better to be alone.

He’s not a hero. Lives can’t be swapped and no one can chose who lives and who dies. There’s always going to be blood on his hands and he needs to learn to live with that. He can’t make it better. That’s not how life deals its cards. Fun fact: there is no beauty in survival. What doesn’t kill you leaves scars, ruins your lungs, dries out all your tears and leaves you lying awake at four in the morning wishing you weren’t alive.

Four am, week sixty two. There’s light in his coma. Not the chance of daybreak, of Elijah waking from this nightmare, define hell. But there’s light. A flower. A rose, actually. Bright red in colour and a voice comes with it.

He meets an angel for the first time and it’s wrong because Elijah Rogers Olsen is going straight to hell for murder. There’s a time for love, laughter and pain. And this is the time for the latter.

But he falls for her, slowly and surely. Undone and on one arm, he’s got all hell. Unfurling scorn and unfaithful graces. Gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. But he requires blood and an ICU unit. Cardiac arrest happens a few times – some blood clots here and there as well as pneumonia once but his dream girl helps him through. Every near death experience dulls his colors, slows the music down but it’s okay because she brings it back. Winter smoke, unbound in his lungs.

Two years, sixteen days and one hour later, Elijah Olsen awakes. His lungs are clogged with water and he can’t speak. Can’t move his body, not even grip his fingers. But he can see. He can see.

She still comes for him and elijah insist that she won't like the real him because he’s a broken mess. It’s a slumbering nightmare of the crash, over and over again. He killed them. He killed them. He killed them. He killed them. They died because he failed.

He just wants to lay down and die.

But he won’t.