Pretty in Pain

I fall into your cold embrace every night and finger the bone on your shoulder that you adore more than me. I let my hands flit across the vertebrae of your spine and caress the gaps I can feel between your ribs. You come apart more and more every time dusk falls and I stitch you up, pull your skin back together and set every single one of your bones back in place, just to see you break again when my lips travel the length of your neck and brave the razor sharp tendons I find there. Sometimes we are two silhouetted figures blocking the moonlight from streaming through the windows; your hip bones bruise my waist when they knock against it because I've tugged you down to whisper promises against your ear and pulled your hair away as well. Often you try to brave the exhaustion of passion, you hate that you can't but I never except your gasped apologies or the hope of tomorrow night. You wrap around me and I wrap around you and we suffocate ourselves in a claustrophobic tightness and you won't let me out  because you think I'll run away just because I can and you can't. I breathe my wishes for you across your body in those moments when you claw at my shoulders just to distract yourself from the pain in your stomach and your chest and your head. You tell me it hurts to see but you never tell me what you see that hurts so much. I often wonder if it's yourself.

We spend our days cocooned in fairytales, in happy endings and thoughtless hours, playing music old school with hundreds of disks at the ready for anything we might feel. You lay with your head against the speakers and listen to the melancholy lyrics of Evanescence- The last song I'm wasting on you, you always told me your philosophy in life is that 'your just so pretty in your pain'. I know you always wanted to cry but you only ever cried when it rained; I told you doing it alone is harder, let the sky cry with you. Once we rolled down a hill all day, we ran up just to fall back down; your face lit up every time you sat up and shook off the dizziness and the pain from the bruises on tiny wrists and a fragile back. As I took care of each bruise that dyed your skin a purpling blue, you whispered through the silence that you didn't believe in only one's and forever mores. I murmured against your skin that I didn't either and we settled for another night of dreamless sleeps and tangled limbs. On 22nd December, we flushed away Oddball, the black goldfish I'd won you at a funfair in our years of freedom. You watched it disappear, like lunch had two hours before, cradled against my chest and laughed through a sob when I nuzzled the erogenous spot on your throat. Despite the tears rolling down your cheeks, you continued to laugh as we forgot the tragedy of the dead goldfish and focused on creating the golden shimmer that misted our thoughts and separated them from the reality we'd run from. You pretended you were a princess, a damsel in distress, when I chased you up and down the stairs after you bit down too hard on my lip. You collapsed that night and I carried you to bed, tucked you in and begged for the apology you couldn't give in your exhausted state. It happened often when I tried to forget who you were.

While you slept, I watched the pendulum of the grandfather clock move. It always reminded me of you. Its endless swaying cycle of monotony, its never-to-be-stopped swing, its annoying tick-tock that we never wanted, always hated, but got anyway. Your days were hard and pain filled and they never, not once, changed. You gave me whiplash with the way your mind flitted from love to self-hatred and never stayed at either for more than an hour. We had problems we didn't ask for, problems you never wanted but developed anyway. We never chose to have to run from the world and from the truth. You asked me to help you in the voice you now save for the nights when you've had an intake, for the pleas, the promises of a better tomorrow and I could never have said 'no'. Once I questioned you. I asked you why. You told me there was no answer, no reason, that it just was. If my heart broke once it was then. Neither of us believed in an escape or a cure or a miracle... We always agreed to sit it out, to play the waiting game and see just how long it took for this paradise we had to end. You woke me every morning with a kiss and an almost silent whisper asking me if it'd be today. I never answered. But you got your revenge the next day, you asked me why not and I couldn't say anything at all because there was nothing to say. I understood you and you understood that; you made me the only person to see you and touch you and kiss you and protect you like no one else ever could.

We fell into this quicksand so long ago and we're very close to being sunk. I can still clutch your skeletal fingers and rest my forehead against yours after we kiss. But I bruise you. I do it just by looking and you scream when I cling to you. You hurt. My fingers trail across your back and leave blood in their wake. My lips travel across the concave surface of your stomach and you flinch. When my body doesn't cover yours in the summer you shiver and wake up and drag my arms around you so you can sleep.



Why? Because your reflection just didn't lie.



Word count- 1000