Hear Murmur

I always was protecting you, like a child who could not be exposed to the night's storm. But who was there to protect me from the rain? I sit here, surrounded by the faded trophies of a glory you never really hoped to acheive - or did you, does the pain sit there in the recesses of your memory? I am the most prized trophy of all: You keep me in a box, like a charm, even though I have shattered the glasses of your window, with notes too sharp to hit you in the spaces where I aim my words. I listen to songs whose sounds are jumbled, trying to relish in the irony of pop hits as my background, but I am too delicate to enjoy the pain, like the S&M fetishist who is afraid of chains. Where will this road take me? Only away from you, I hope, but I feel you clawing into my skin like a tiger, feel the blood before I see its red. I no longer feel the wounds; they have grown too deep inside, like plankton lining the sea's soft floor, softer than a love I could never hope to have. If anything, time has only given me the ability to dissociate myself from my words, to notice the corniness of my own tears; I am told this makes me self-aware. I am also told it makes me a horrible lover. I can ruin an "I love you" with a smile, but after the words have faded, their sound-waves reverberating into the air's soft memory, they stay embedded in me like the shards of glass that forever ruined that boy's vision in the Snow Queen, that made him see the world as grey instead of pink, until his friend rescued him from the ice that had grown around his heart. When I read that story, even at the age of five, I feared that this could happen to me. "You are no longer my sugarplum", my mother told me, "you are no longer sweet", and then I heard her talking to her friend about sleeping with my father. I had a hole in my heart, I was told, and I knew then, that I would never be able to love you, even before the cardiologist came with his scary charts and mentioned words I could not understand, words that have been burned into my chest with wires and x-ray machines, and technicians feeling up my breasts. Their hands were cold, like zombies, but of course, since this was before the zombie fetish had become popular, I had no terms with which to phrase this coldness to myself, and nothing to distract me from the sounds of sharp nails scraping against my skin, and I could feel the weight against my areolas, and now the images of hands and metal are blending with the images of your hands against white sheets, and I feel like flowers, a heap of roses and lily-petals to line the walkway to your chamber of self-congratulation. And all the time, the beating of my heart, a gentle rythm to the silences of your betrayal, the beating of my heart, murmuring and inconstant, between a shifting weight I can not fathom, the beating of my heart as I mock the cadence of my words, as I type these letters that suddenly seem devoid of meeting, a mockery of the concepts they can not encompass, with their thin, black bodies, shriveling in the wind like the leaves of a dehydrated tree, shriveling like the skin beneath your eyes, on the day I saw your face for the last time.