A homeless man throws his tattered scarf away, malnourished cloth: ragged and decaying. Gaping holes impale the stringy, moulding, skeletal fabric. The colour of dust that collects on buried coffins.
I am that scarf.
Entire universes' worth of sunshine collect in a lustrous marble, searing the world's unfathomable beauty deep into the caverns of its wavy toothpaste streaks. Minty transcendent exhilaration etching into its compressed lungs.
I am that marble.
I am a contradicting, chaotic collision of love doesn't last and I must have known you in all my past lives. The cheek-puckering muddle of rancid limes – I destroy everything I touch – and powdery sugar cubes – I'm exactly who I want to be.
I wonder: if people discovered the mess that cowered behind this apathetic exterior – my confounded inability to stitch together the fragmented jewels of truth about living – would they still crave my presence? Would they still look at me and dream of freely soaring eagles; of wild spirits that can't be tamed?
That was how Luke saw me. He thought I could fix him; breathe life into his miserable, lackadaisical existence. He only saw me for the façade I so meticulously constructed: built with bricks I had fired in a kiln and shaped with my own two blistered hands, wiping my own sweltering tears away and tending to the throbbing wounds that bubbled on my palms myself. And deep down, I resented him for that; for believing the lie I so insouciantly told, that I had spent years intricately weaving. That's why I rejected him so violently.
What if they saw the real me? The paradoxical, unsolvable disarray that lies in shatters against my contracted diaphragm, holding my breath for as long as I can remember. Fingers laced through ballerina pink, satin ribbons pulled taut, for fear of them unraveling; porcelain heart that has lately come undone over and over and over again.
I flick putrefying ashes off my burning cigarette, poised lithely between my index and middle digits, staining the stubby appendages with its addictive saccharine scent. The cinder debris chokes the moist soil below. Tendrils of smouldering death flitter into the air, cackling as each inhalation destroys me even further.
He knew who you really were, a voice caresses its spindly fingers of accusation against my temples, leaching in and swirling around until my mind is coated in a dense blanket of suffocating fog, and he loved you for it.
I inhale another lungful desperately, squeezing my eyes shut; deep creases forming by their corners, skin folding upon skin to create valleys of regrets and the all-consuming ache of wistful longing.
It doesn't matter, I scream inwardly at the voice, tossing the disappearing cigarette onto the ground. It leisurely takes the life of a lone emerald blade of grass, indolently peeling the chlorophyll smoothness away from its forking veins, withering it into its charred remains. I watch on in a wrangling mixture of heart-sinking sympathy and detached indifference. What is left of the seething body glances up at me, and we instantaneously enter into a stare down.
Which is worse: the one who has no say in their death, or the one who inflicts it upon themselves?
I don't think I know how to love anything.
I have my mother's eyes and my father's mouth. On my face, they are still in love.
My mother is not a beautiful woman. That may reek a little of ingratitude, but let me explain.
She is attractive, sure. She has dark russet hair – the colour of freshly brewed coffee mingling with buttery toffees – that sits, in wisps, against her emaciated collarbones, and she possesses fair, dewy skin that is perpetually perfumed with the chalky scent of anemones.
In the language of flowers, anemone means forsaken. When the poppy-hued bloom dies, its pungent odour elevates to a state of unbearable asphyxiation.
My mother has reeked of her abandonment for ten years.
She carries her sadness like a backpack. She lugs it around with her in her face, drowning rocks embedded in her gasping pores, despairing oceans residing in her eyes. Over the years, the amber in those orbs has turned an evanescent turquoise; the seas of unshed tears taking over.
I gaze at her pityingly, the picture of everything I had grown up trying not to become; gnawing the chains off my shackled hands, thrashing riotously against mortar walls and yelling I will never end up like you, subsisting on air and lies. I read somewhere once, that as adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
"Where's Dad?" I ask redundantly – we both know perfectly well that he's probably out with his latest woman of the week. Disgust creeps in my veins, slinking underneath my skin.
"Oh, probably still working," she chortles falteringly, excruciating knowledge residing on her brow.
I am back in my childhood home and I refuse to succumb to its stagnation.
My hardened fingertips tap against a teak tabletop, each inaudible rapping whispering mountains of secrets. Closetfuls of hushed we never speak about this bursting open and landing, teeth-first, on the concrete pavement. The ivory enamel chips, skidding along jagged gravel.
I finally blurt out the words I have waited ten years to ask. "Why did you stay with him?"
The question knocks against her wrinkled eyelids, painted dusky pink, the colour of the setting sun against flimsy clouds; carnation syrup and candied cherry concentrate. She smiles a smile that has a lifetime's worth of pain ingrained in the dents.
"It's hard to say," she coos sensitively, and I question if whatever answer she gives me will ever be good enough to justify her not having upped and left the moment she discovered my father's affairs, "Maybe because nothing made me happier and sadder than him."
Confusion forms a cocktail miasma behind my eyes: blueberry for bewilderment, peach for puzzlement, mango for mystification. Dollop of desiccated dragon fruit for disappointment.
"That's love to you?"
A maternal beam clings onto my mother's sunken cheeks, almost as if joy and pride is twirling behind her gaunt skin; infantile hands clasped together and chanting ring-a-round the rosies. "Who's the lucky boy?"
Chase's lopsided grin manifests in my mind. I shove it out, letting it skewer itself on the spike-riddled ground. On instinct, I go back to grasp it, right between my two hands, before it hits the lethal spears. I'm sorry, I lament into its delicate ear, cradling it in the crook of my arm, as blue iron fluid trickles from its gashed lip, I leave nothing unscathed.
"It doesn't matter," I repeat, digging my ridged fingernails into my curled up palm, the icy blade of a knife into the membrane of a dried-up orange, "It was nothing." The lie sinks its fangs into my fragile neck, injecting venom into the throbbing jugular vein; it was everything.
"The trick is to find someone who makes you more happy than sad, but can make you experience both." I eye her warily, as if unconvinced by her statement. "This boy then," she begins her parental interrogation, torchlight shining in my irises and handcuffing me to a stainless steel table, metal glacial against my wrists, "Do you love him?"
A question like do you love him? was an itch our doctors told us not to scratch.
A lone fingernail picks at the tender, bruised scab, agonizing merlot blood oozing out from beneath the hardened film. "Love doesn't last."
"That's not an answer."
You love him.
The galaxies that revolved behind his mesmeric violet eyes, Saturn and Mars and Venus dancing around on their axis's, shooting stars blazing trails of magnificent wonder through the indigo sky. Kaleidoscopic.
You love him.
The way his svelte fingers breathed come here with every movement and welcome home with every sylphlike lift.
You love him.
Strawberry shortcake and caramel butterscotch that melded together to create all the goodness in the world I sometimes had trouble believing in. Velvety softness that my hands could get lost in for eternity.
Of course I love him, okay?
It was the way his mind reached into the most messed up places in me – he made me feel like me. Not the persona I'd constructed to barricade off the outside world, or the pretentious cold veneer I donned when somebody tried to reach out to me. He made me feel like the person I loved, the me that I had decided I loved long before I could love anyone or anything else. The me who sometimes got lost in my fear of forgetting how to love myself when falling in love with other people. Irony in its truest and barest form.
"Don't deprive yourself of happiness, sweetheart," my mother's soothing voice rings through my eardrums, and for some reason, it makes saline tears spring to my eyes. No matter how old you get, your mother's knowing tones could always strike a chord pulled too taut within you; twanging discordantly on the fibrous string. "You've proven that you don't need anybody else to get by. You've proven that you can be by yourself and be perfectly happy. But who are you proving that to? And why? As long as you know it, then you don't have to actively shut every single person out just to make your point."
She was right, oh, God, she was right. I wanted the world to envy my deep enamour with my own solitude so much that I got caught up in the imbibing cycle of never letting anybody in. Who was I trying to impress? What did I gain from climbing up treacherous, snow-capped mountaintops alone, resting my shaking hands on my weary hips and haughtily proclaiming I am complete, everybody else is none of my concern? As long as I was always certain of it, I didn't have to relentlessly close my heart off to the intrinsic connection with other human beings; the good, earthly kindness that ties us all together.
"I'm terrified," I irrevocably confess to her, and a convulsing shockwave of honesty and humiliation jolts through my crashing body, and I know I am on this earth and my heart is beating. I watch as the foamy waves in her eyes press adoring kisses against the shoreline of her pupils. "I could wake up tomorrow and we could both not be in love anymore."
"You get that from me," she shakes her head despondently, small sterling silver hoop earrings swaying with her deliberate motions, reflecting the incandescent light, "You keep trying to hold together things that are out of your control."
"What does that mean?"
"You don't want to get hurt, so you close yourself off before anything has even gotten the chance to begin. You can't know happiness if you're always trying to protect yourself from sadness." Silence reigns, buzzing in the air, before she continues, "Listen, life isn't about a linear line of just pure happiness. Of course, that's what everybody wants, but that's just not how it is. Life is about experiencing the full spectrum of human emotion. And if you find somebody who can make you do just that, then you should hold onto them."
"Are you saying that's why you've stayed with Dad all these years?" I question, and I wonder how it's possible to feel confusion and clarity in such strong volumes and in such equal amounts.
A glimmer of something unknown plays on her thin lips. In all my twenty-two years, I've never seen anything bearing a resemblance to that gracing her face. The indentations of desperation on her temples seem to almost swell with a certain lightness. The fluorescent light paints a luminescent halo on the crown of her head, each stroke painstakingly brushed on by an expert artist. Radiance emanates from her pores, fairies pirouetting in breezy cinnamon air.
Hope.
"I'm leaving him."
Shock pulses through my synapses, surprise pounding in the cavity between my optic nerves and brain. Pride surges within my heart.
"Why now?" a large beam cements itself onto my face, carved into the ash canvas, "After all this time?"
"I've decided that if I can have a daughter who loves herself the way she does, then I can love myself too."
I lied.
My mother is a beautiful woman – not that I'm one to care about beauty. But I don't merely mean that she's pretty. I mean that she finally lives with passion; with a godly refusal to meekly accept the hand of cards life has dealt her.
She pulls a concealed queen of hearts out from her pocket, fanning it onto the forest table for all to see.
Straight flush, I refuse to exist.
Read them and weep, I demand to live.
She's beautiful in that way.
The dam irreversibly falls, and unadulterated happiness gushes from my eyes. The oceans swishing in my mother's glittering orbs pour out, translucent crystal droplets dripping down my cheeks. I expel for her the tears she has held back for years, and the steady, solid amber finally returns to her blazing eyes.
The stench of dead anemones dissipates, pungent molecules vanishing into the sparkling air. The fragrance of freshly sifted powder rests softly along her skin, and that's when I know: she has come back from the dead.
I forgot that anemone also means anticipation; the sweet nectar of hopefulness and letting good things come to you in just the right way and in just the right time.
She resumes, "Loving yourself fiercely means not denying yourself of happiness when it comes your way." She gingerly places her sandalwood-scented palm on my wrist, and I remember that I'm the only person in the world who knows what her heart sounds like from the inside. "Remember, sweetie, even when there's thunder and the sky is crying, you're still my favourite summer dress. You're to wear yourself like you believe it."
Disclaimer: I do not own 'Skins', Warsan Shire's work, 'The History of Love' by Nicole Krauss or '10 things I will tell my daughter' by Julia LaValley.
Author's Note: Oh man, okay. I truly apologize for leaving the story on such a melancholy note. For a while, I actually considered ending the story right there, because, as some of you lovely readers said, it seemed sort of fitting. But, I couldn't bear to do it, so here we go. I intend for there to be about three more chapters, so the story is drawing to a close. Thank you again for all the reviews/likes/follows, and for staying with me despite the sporadic updates. This is actually my first long fic, and I can't thank all of you enough for sticking around!