Monster

Her desert dry lips parted with a shallow sigh as her sunken eyes meticulously scanned the dried leaves amongst the worn-down cement. August had always been Hannah’s favorite. Tugging her sweatshirt closer yet, her rain-clouded face struck with bright light as the sky threatened to open its gate to the threshold and let all its contents seep out in a rioting manner. That sky always looked so welcoming. Her left Converse always turning slightly to the side as she stepped, she thoughtfully ambled father down in the decaying street in autopilot, as she did almost every solitary day. Always watching that left foot turn in, ever since the piercing glazes hacked her porcelain skin to the sandpaper bones. Not that there was much to cut to begin with.

A human skeleton, skin and bones. She loved to think that relinquishing her life to whatever power was out there was invigorating. Claws gnawing the inner muscle of her stomach and her nerve tissue slowly disintegrating, her left foot stepping crooked in front of the right. Autopilot as she had always been, nothing to think, only the body to live it with. Not so bad feeling like a metallic computer, not really having to think, just do. Her twig arms held in the
monster that was maliciously streaming along her weak muscle tissue.

It hurt.

If for one millisecond of a moment that anyone believes the pain is a simple figment, they are deathly mistaking. She knew they couldn’t feel what screamed through her veins, she knew, and she forgave them. She envied that they felt whole when she in fact felt like there was a hole in her. What was it like to feel whole? They took it for granted, without a doubt in
her mind. She thought about it excruciatingly too much, so much that her monster took her under its chains and she became the rusted metallic machine that no longer longed to think any more. That no longer wished to feel. No longer anything. But she was something.

Dreams cluttered her cloudy mind as she walked along the pathway that was her own. She wanted them more than anything.

No.

She needed them. It was a physical need. It was a need that intensified sevenfold every time her brain cells resided in their teasing presence. It was like a rainbow to her dreary sunken corneas. Those hazel orbs once shown like rebel diamonds. The words slaughtered their curiosity. Their potential. Their life. They were just windows now, just like caves. But everyone else couldn’t see in.
Her abdomen crushed beneath it’s own weight and contracted in agonizing agony.
“I need it, I need it, I need it.”

It sickened her. She sickened herself. Why am I like this? I want it but it’s too far. No, I can’t have it. It’s not really there. I can’t have it.
Her scarecrow legs, like endless roads, continued even when they passed by, but she tried her best, always, not to stagger.

“She looks like a pole.”
“What a freak.”

Her stomach churned but the cells behind the bones in her forehead paid no attention, her ears did, but her mind was gone. The stark white bathroom never looked so good. The capsules in the cabinets were her knives and she slashed her body away.
“I don’t want it.”

Flaring lights and now hazed off sounds, tubes being thrown around, air being breathed for her.
“No. What’s it like to feel whole?”
“You’ll know soon enough if you don’t hold on sweetheart.”
The beeping ceased as her calloused lungs filtered out the last of the contents it had once meagerly sucked in.

Resting in the ground, now real skin and bones.
To her, her monster was gone.

But it always lives.