The Morning After.

The first thing I do as I wake up is shudder. I see you, leaning over me to kiss me, but all I feel is fear. If you go to bed terrified, the fear just percolates inside you, walking around your somnolent structure, trying to escape, like an overzealous cat trapped inside a single room. I think I could hear it as I slept, tapping against the ruins of my peace, scratching at the edges of my existence to check if these walls are truly impermeable, not so loud that it woke me up, but loud enough to keep me from forgetting it was there. I feel the fear flash through my eyes as soon as I open them, before I am even conscious enough to recall my name, I know that I should continue to fear you. What a strange and unusual pleasure it is, to wake up, still terrified of something that has already happened.

The last thing you do before you leave the house is poke at my wounds. You place your fingertips on the swelling on my cheek and press into it, squeeze my busted lip between your fingers and jam your knee against my battered cunt. It's like you're activating the pain, your touch makes it come alive, I feel like I was a beige marionette lying tangled in my own strings on the floor, until you picked me up and made my blood run scarlett with your animation of me. Sometimes it feels like there is no life in these veins until you show me the pain, no music in my bones until you play me, no scent of existence emanating off my skin until you turn me on and make me human again. It's like I spent the night craving the pain that was already in my body, like someone turned the sound off on the music box, but left the pony still turning, dancing by rote to the suggestion of melody.

The next thing I do is stand before a mirror and stare at myself. I can never tell who is looking back at me from the mirror but I know her visage so well, I can spot every little difference between yesterday and today. Yesterday she bore no claw-marks on her chest, no dried blood smeared across her chin, her face looked so different, so symmetrical, her skin less grainy and mouth less plump, but nothing looks quite as different as her eyes. Yesterday, she flashed the twinkle of the naïve and oblivious, today she stares at me as if she has aged a thousand years and seen the truth so many times, it no longer feels distinct from the lies. The soul of the desert looks back at me through the pools of sorrow that teem in her eyes. I reach out to touch, only to question why I can't do this to myself. Why can't I ever hurt myself in a way that makes me look different? A thousand stakes I have put through my heart and left it unaltered, and with a single jagged word, you make me look like someone else.

The second thing I do in the shower is hug myself and cry. Later, I know, you will make me cry again because I robbed you of the opportunity to witness my tears and I will mean all of my apologies, but for now, I inveigle myself into accepting the relief. The weight of the water in my hair makes it feel like I am being pulled back, like it's your grip that is exposing my neck and tilting my face into the water. It pours inside my nose and makes me splutter and all at once, the exhaustion of hours spent writhing wash over my body. There is no tiredness of the body that I have ever learnt to enjoy, except this exhaustion of being depleted by you. I put my face against the bathroom floor and even though I have been awake for hours, I finally feel like I am asleep. A part of my soul lives inside this grey tile and it clicks together with its counterpart as I curl into myself. The light plays tricks and rainbows dance onto my skin through the water, and in the translucent assault of the scalding stream I finally see myself. I don't know the girl in the mirror, but the girl drowning in the inch of water on the bathroom floor feels like me.