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laydownmyvirtue · 3 years ago

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𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐭 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐝.

The cover of nightfall brought with it many paths, each one wrapped in its own kind of shadow.

The shadows that would cause my parents to overlook a dip that hadn’t been on the bridge before that night, one that would leave a gaping hole in my life.

The shadows that she requested filled the hotel room from wall to wall, as I sank to my knees and chased after every sound she had to give. The shadows that cast her in shame and ecstasy as my tongue curled and drove her over the edge. I could follow her over the brink, to plummet beneath the icy waters of a life long gone, my breath robbed by nothing as pleasurable as what she lived through in these sheets.

The world was nothing but shadows, ones that could cling and distort, until there wasn’t a familiar face or place to find.

“A pleasure, as always, darling.”

Claudia’s hair tickled its way along my face, as she took my chin between her fingers, and lured me in for a kiss that only came with an added expense. Some days, she didn’t speak a word, using only her eyes and a long earned trust to communicate exactly where she wanted me. Those were the days when she sunk beneath the waves of shame, though it was unclear where the feeling stemmed from. She’d never spoken the words, leaving the answer to my assuming mind. Was the shame in another woman burying herself between her thighs, or was the shame in the cost that came along with every exchange? The assumption changed, from week to week, and on nights like this — when she sought what affection she could before heading for the door, I guessed that this was the only place she could allow herself to exist in peace.

As the door clicked and announced her departure, I was left to the darkness that seemed to have a love of pulling us under, each in our own way. Left to my own pondering on the idea of peace, to the vivid colors that would seep from my memory to fill a room that was entirely devoid, they would pull me under like a current I knew too well.

The first, the shade of chocolate brown that my mother was kind enough to bestow upon me. The warmth of her eyes, passed down to her only daughter, so that the world would never be deprived of such a comfort. She’d shared her life’s blood, and as my teenage years rolled in, she shared her wishes that some day I would follow her down that road. She hoped that every ounce of compassion she could see reflecting from doting doe eyes, would one day find another host, that this family filled with such love would never end.

The second, an unforgettable shade of grey that painted my parents as people I no longer recognised, on the night when this family filled with such love met its demise. Grey was rarely a color considered remarkable, though it had a kind of brightness to it, one that flushed out every other trace of life from those you held dearest. It would do its job in taking away the traits you loved most about them, and once it was done, it would make a new home in you. It would take the brightness you once knew it for, and cast your days with lifeless clouds, ones that cared nothing for the safety of roof tiles, or the protection of a patchwork blanket your mother had sewn. They would blind you to the daylight, exist with free rein of when they might drop their showers upon you, they would follow you from one side of the world to the other — taunting you for just how impossible it was to escape their silent wrath. Whether you sat within the walls of your childhood home, or upon the floor of some luxury hotel named in a language you didn’t know, they would find you.

The last, a splash of red that would seem startling in comparison to the ways your life was painted these days. The red that wanted to declare a thrill, to sharpen the edges of the plane ticket that Jenna had pressed into my grasp, as if to outline just how exciting any such trip should be. The red that shone over the district where I would one day have to make my start, where palms left no handprints upon flesh that had known the touch of many, where fingerprints felt bloodied by the cost they came with, and the price I paid for these sins. I wasn’t sure that the world would ever exist without the crimson tint that seemed to follow me, an ever present reminder of what had been spilled by my mistakes, of the only path that could patch the holes left within the fabric of mine and my brother’s life.

I had no trouble recalling the day this had truly been set into motion, and it wasn’t the one that even I would expect it to be. It wasn’t the night when my drunken phone call had ended in my parents crossing over a bridge that they never should have been on, when they met an end they never should have known, even in their cruellest of nightmares. On the days when they were forced to imagine a world where they would never be there to shed tears at my high school graduation, when the papers demanded their names be signed to this twisted reality, they’d chosen a person. A person who would be tasked with ensuring Jeremy and I would be safe, as safe as we could be in the grips of grief — Jenna. Jenna Sommers. Aunt Jenna. Whichever way we would come to know her as more than the lovable hurricane who only passed through on Christmas Day, she was the plan for how we would survive.

Once the funerals had passed, once the guests and their homemade meals started to fizzle out, once there was nothing but silent agony to sit between the three of us, the cracks began to show. She was nothing but a kid herself, however justified that status may or may not be for a woman in her mid-twenties, it was the truth of who Jenna was. She wasn’t built for a life of intense structure and responsibility, one where she had to worry more about food on the table, than which of her friends had the most reliable stash of pot. There was something else there, something that I never could get close enough to touch, that frightened her to her very core. It was beyond this role that she never truly believed she would be given, something about this life, this town, this family that shook her faith in more than herself. At times, I wanted to believe that it was nothing more than an intense case of commitment phobia at play, but I had always been cursed with a sense for when there was more beneath the surface. Of a person, of a thing, of a story that didn’t sound just right — the intricacies of a piece that didn’t quite fit, they would trouble my mind, and sink to set my stomach into a frenzy. There was something more, something Jenna didn’t say aloud, and it was bigger than any fear she had of accidentally killing the kids her sister had left behind.

I couldn’t say whether it was that fear, my prying about it, or perhaps a combination of both, that set her on the course she chose. The one that led to her crashing through the front door on a Tuesday afternoon, freshly purchased luggage in one hand, an envelope containing two passes to Amsterdam airport in the other. At first, I was entirely sure that this was some form of mental break, that she had decided the only cure to the clouds that hung over us was to rush to a country famous for its tolerant drug policies. Then came the revelation that someone was being left behind, and it wasn’t Jeremy or myself. We had cousins abroad, Jenna would go on to announce, with her very best game show host impression. This was the prize we had won for being orphaned, a one way journey to the home of people whose names we hadn’t so much as heard before the grand plan had been revealed to us. These strangers who were to be treated as family, would take us in, and be so kind as to grant us the clean break that Jenna insisted was needed. It would be the only way to truly heal — away from the home whose bones were built by our parents, away from the never ending questioning about how we were doing, away from a place that now knew us as broken creatures. Away from her, away from our friends, away from any support system that we knew, away from any happy memory that we’d ever made.

That was the day, the one that led to this, that left me a shell of the person I had once known. Nothing more than a crumpled up piece of paper, fallen to my knees with no client in sight, with no escape within these hollow halls. The in-between was a blur at times, and if asked I couldn’t say if it was my mind’s attempt at self defense, or if the frenzied nature of our downward spiral was simply too close to Chaos to comprehend. A promised land of reprieve would turn to something far more sinister as the years ticked by, as age turned the page into adulthood and asked more of me than I ever thought I could give, as letters of demand piled high and someone had to break. This life of mine would find avenues anew to shatter my mind and the dreams it contained, my heart and the purity of love I’d once known, it would crawl into the depths of my core as another found their Nirvana within the wasteland that had been made of this body.

Regardless of how lost I became, in my own mind or the streets that claimed me, the burden of finding my way out still fell upon me. I couldn’t afford to succumb to the shadows, no matter how warm they could paint their welcomes, there was purpose to this sacrifice and it did not lay with me on these finely carpeted floors. I would always have to pull strength from places that didn’t exist, to land back on my feet, to make quick work of dipping beneath the heat of a shower’s spray. To return to a reflection I would pass on my way out, to an image of someone who might be mistaken for Elena Gilbert in a world outside of this. I would carry the visions gifted by the shadows home with me, I would allow for the memories of happier times to float along the canals that accompanied me on my stroll back to reality.

#solo

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