Porcelain Skin

The guilt and greed of past trauma that flourishes and fades in our minds.

A candle only burns when the tip is ignited, when someone sets it ablaze with a match or a lighter, but I can never find it. Imagining as the matches scratch against my skin, a redness emerging as I light the slim disk of wax, awaiting as it melts and falls away, deforming a perfect sculpture. I place the dirty bag that encloses over my head and burn it too, making it impossible to breathe. I gasp and gasp for air, for anything to satisfy my raging hunger, only for my attempts to be shut down and vision fades out once again. Choking on my breath that stinks with unwashed stench, sour after years of unclean memories.

I feel claustrophobic in my skin, scratching and scratching at past scars that barely had time to heal, only for my feeble attempts to claw their way out, faltering as I give up like the loser I am. I try to feel something every time, I guess. I try to strum my guitar against every fret; I tackle over hurdles of assignments after assignments because it's the only thing I know how to do, the paper feeling thick against my fingertips, ink leaking away from the paper as it rips under the pressure of each click of a pen or the twirling of a bracelet; the black marker turning red like the paper towels that I use to cloak it with.

I feel too much. My battery overloaded, reaching its maximum capacity and trying to hide how it nearly exploded. And while I spew out the acid that lingers in my stomach, I feel nauseous, mind eating, brain clicking and muscles thinking. Everything is messed up because I am too.

I feel the guilty tears race over my cheek, the selfish satisfaction that I am not as damaged. The loving support from others and yet the third of my life that he began within and left with a force that slammed the door off its hinges remain faded. All while I sit on the couch, compressing hands over ears and curled up into a foetal ball, waiting for the noise to stop. It did, the heavy price being a long-lasting effect on the people I thought I knew.

I try to hide it, arresting my dull emotions in a theoretical prison, an Alcatraz of the lost and forgotten. I shut my eyes but hear the dementors crying, I shudder my mind as if they are a camera, tracking every memory only for it to wonder.

I welcome the cold compress on my forehead, I feel the heat of the coffee that spilt on his lap, I hear the screeching and the begging, I eat up the fear, now only understanding how powerless I was. And because of that, because of the monster that I was conceived from, the regretful flailing sperm that finally reaches its hand out only to lay it on us, the torrent of thoughts that stray away but bounces back from its elastic chains remind me of only single memories that splutter like fireflies in the night, almost impossible to catch: almost.

The pounding of my brother's feet racing away from his pursuer, imagining the tears streaming down his youthful face as he gains mental and physical bruises that'll scar him longer than I will. I blocked out any and every with me, now chilly and freezing in hoodies and jeans to hide the invisible cuts that no-one sees.

And yet it's quiet: the memory fading like every emotion left in my body, the feeling cold and dark. The image dulls like a polaroid photograph after years and years of waiting in the sun, without the eternal satisfaction of remembering a moment of your childhood. Whether there ever was a photograph of bruises on my skin in the catalogue of forgotten memories, I no longer know - blanked out, scribbled on with a permanent marker that only obscures the picture, and not the emptiness it leaves behind. It lied as I feel the dull blade of my fingernails dig into the flesh that falls from my body, too afraid to even shout out or call for help, because I was weak, I am weak as I just sat there, doing as I was told as I just let him tear pieces away from the kind soul of my brother that I adore most in this world.

People ask how are you? As if they actually knew what went through my head every passing second, the ticking from the clock clanging and ringing in my ears, the bomb counting down with a deafening pitch, the roaring of thunder or the smashing of glass, or the voice that I no longer recognise or ask. I try to scream with no breath, try to breathe with no air, try to hear with no ears. It feels impossible, dreadful ringing - not of a gun or of a weapon - but of words and of levers as his fists sound out across the house with the power of winches and unholy heaven.

All of it lies inside of my mind, and the memory becomes faded like an antique in a store, abandoned from love as it withers away in a cocoon of dust and webs - tangled and chained to its bench of loneliness. The smiles only small paintings on the pot, the inside empty and dark, ready to shatter with a force unimaginable like blood water racing along a track, skidding its wheels and crashing into a barrier - the ceramic shards fracturing, cracking and yet... nothing shows, because it's all old, and no-one cares about old. The shards that now can be used as ammunition tears pieces of me too. Do I really want to forget? Whatever I chose, I always regret.