So I've been reading a lot, and while reading a fantastic story on LJ I found a piece of Richard Siken's poetry. If you haven't read anything by him, then go right now and you can come read this mess later. Because seriously, his stuff is mind-blowing.
12/10 - I've recently been posting on AO3 under the name Mamihlapinatapai, and while doing such, have been doing some editing. Today, because I'm crazy, I've decided to update everything on here. The changes won't affect the story line, it's just to clean everything up a bit.
"Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed." -Richard Sikens
-0-
Suppose you're in a room.
Suppose you're in a room that you've sat in for a year with a group of misfits that you want to strangle half the time. This room is empty, mostly, thirteen empty chairs and an echo where you used to hear. Suppose there's a boy, beautiful and blond, with a mouth that you kind of can't help but awe at. He looks whole, unscarred, the kind of brand spanking new that makes you want to simultaneously break him and wrap him in bubble wrap and lock him away.
Now stop for a second, pause this frame and go back five months.
To a white-washed hospital room, and another blond who holds your hand and pulls away at the same time, to a brunette who's been your best friend since you've had the lost dads club and it knocks the breath out of you, this realization that falling for the wrong people is typical for you. Now go back, readjust the lens, focus in on the way your hands tense, fisted on your knees like they were when your best friend decided redemption was less exhausting than anger but harder than forgiving and just settled for something in between. (You've heard it's been called indifference).
Breathe, darling, no one ever said you would get out of here unscathed.
-0-
Map out your heart.
Trace the lines between broken and whole; between dead and alive. Don't cut too deep or you won't have anything redeemable left. Now take the blade, don't even bother wiping the blood away, and hand it to the blond on your right. The one with the mouth; the one who's whole. Watch him trace his own twisted map. Oh sweetheart, look, you match.
Isn't that surprising.
-0-
Forgiveness comes easily to none of you and the blond whose stomach is now empty, who hid away the t-shirts with your name on the back that looked lovely on her, has a tendency to lash out and maybe you bear the brunt of it, but he isn't excused either. Violence breeds violence and he's yelling at you in that same room where you mistakenly thought whole on the outside was the same as whole on the inside. This argument is about nothing, really, he's upset because the blonde queen to his king has a price on your head and he doesn't understand why. You've always liked to take what you want, like ATM machines, so the fact that you're the one that burns the rulebook, the one thar kisses him in the empty room with chairs isn't surprising. He tastes of copper from the place where your fist connected with his mouth earlier and you were never meant to play this role again.
-0-
Press record, you'll want to remember where you first failed later.
You have a pretty brunette boy who used to maybe love you, and a pretty blond boy who probably doesn't love you, so, really, kissing a trashed red-head who believes she loves you isn't the worst thing you've done. Not when you're this drunk, the dull ache of half a dozen half-healed wounds blurring the edges of your perception. This is the role you were meant to play.
-0-
Question.
If you're in a room where everyone gets what they want, and you ask for your dad, that makes you selfish. And if you ask for her, the little one that's half yours that makes you selfish. But if you ask for him, the blond with the mouth, what does that make you?
Damned, maybe, but then again haven't you always been.
-0-
Pause it here, this image that you've seen a million times before and will see a million times more, just stop it.
The blonde's split knuckles and blood that pools in your mouth until you're forced to spit it out for fear of choking on it. You've seen this image a billion more times with a brunette you used to call friend, but this time is different. This time you didn't have a right to be hit. Or maybe you did and the other images, the ones with the brunette, need to be refocused a little more. (You were never good at reading the signs.) This is the second time that punches have been thrown with the boy with the pretty mouth, but the first where the reason has nothing to do with getting each other to understand that half dead hearts love a little rougher. No, this has to do with the consequences of trying to kill the rest of a heart that no longer belongs just to you.
-0-
Tragedy has a face, and just because you choose not to recognize it, that doesn't you can ignore it. The face, a pretty blond with a pretty mouth and a dead heart, says I'll give you everything, but it falls through and hasn't it always, darling. It saves you a million times over just to watch you burn again and again.
-0-
Maybe you'll ruin each other.
Maybe you'll chip away at the pieces that survived childhood and first loves, until there's nothing left but a shell of two people with half dead hearts and a dozen more half-healed cuts. Maybe he'll say, decades later, that you two had no other ending but destruction, because you didn't love in a way that either of you understood. Maybe you'll get used to that fact in a way that is both heart-breaking and typical, because getting over things is one of your specialties.
Or.
Maybe he'll sit down in the passenger seat of you car after graduation and wrap his hand around the pulse point in your wrist. Maybe you'll feel like you're digging yourself a premature grave by stealing the innocent until you remember that whole on the outside never means whole on the inside. Maybe you'll save yourselves from drowning by pulling yourselves out of the lake of fire, and you'll laugh because the world will hold it against you.
Maybe you'll discover something there are no words for.