I have grown to accept that this is all I will feel now. A solemn grave of emptiness, a flag in the sand that has been snatched by the victor, and I have lost. I lost everything a long time ago, and still I find myself by the puppeteer's strings. Pulling and delicately weaving the threads to put on the show I was born into. I also sit in front of this disorientating LED, pushing the waking waves into the corners of my mind to keep the nightmares away. But they are criminals, those nightmares. They escape every day and wreak their chaos on the citadel of my mind, once so glorious and now forgotten by all. It has been forsaken to the centuries by its citizens.
This is what I am now. Some shadow, the Frida Kahlo of poetry, casting only reflection and wallowing in mostly self-inflicted pain. But my mirrors cannot be real if the person in them is not, right?
I have been murdered and defiled and left by the roadside for the wolves. I let them do it. I laid down for them and welcomed the ruin. Destruction, at its very least, brings relief to depressive inactivity. It drowns out the loss of construction, brings new life to the grief it leaves behind. Amongst the remains, I mourn for the woman who would have never written these words.