Still Here

I’m lying six feet under, my body rotting around me, caged by the earth and coffin, but soon I’ll be free. I can move my fingers and toes a little bit, the very atoms in the air passing through me. I couldn’t do that yesterday in the cold freezer at the morgue.

I can hear him. He picked out my clothes, decided how my hair would look, and what jewelry I would wear. He thinks I'm dead. I am, but now that I’m like this, what am I exactly?

I can hear my mother wailing through the soft dirt. My father is trying to comfort her and him.

I can still smell the roses my sister laid on my chest. She sprayed perfume on them, the perfume he bought her. The perfume that she wore everywhere. The perfume that was her.

It’s been happening for years.

For him a game and for her a bit of fun.

A truth they shared that only they knew about. Like kids huddled under a blanket at a sleepover, sharing secrets by flashlight and whispers in the middle of the night.

I wasn't blind, but seeing it was worse.

My sister sobbing into the sheets unable to face me, sheets I changed that morning, in a bed that I paid for, in a house in my name.

And him, yelling at me to get out, that I was making her upset. That everything was wrong. I didn’t make it far.

He killed me and yet he didn’t.

He took everything from me and yet he didn't.

He loved me and yet he didn't.

He loved the idea of me.

But now six feet down in the earth below them I wonder if he knew what the actual emotion was.

Not just the rush of chemicals leaving the brain, but what actually brought those emotions forward.

He doesn’t need it. He was most likely never capable of emotion to begin with now that I think about it. His mother robbed him of that.

He was complicated to begin with, but I never liked easy. Maybe it was both our faults, he was not the norm and I had to be perfect.

Maybe it was doomed from the beginning. From the very first, “Hey.”

I wonder now that I’m gone, will they stay the same or will they be more public about it? Not immediately of course, they have to play the part of the grieving husband and the mourning sister.

Soon I’ll see him again when I drag myself through the earth to the world above, claw my way through the crust, and walk myself home. If hell is below me I wasn’t buried down far enough to find it.

Nothing may be able to bring me back but now I can do whatever I want to him and no one will believe him. Just like when I’d tell everyone and they wouldn’t believe me.

They preferred the perfect lie.

I liked him a lot but I never did love him. My parents were the ones who wanted that, for us to be a perfect couple regardless of how many fractures there were.

My entire life was spent trying to please others, to creating "Perfect". I felt like a doll left in the box, placed on the shelf. A permanent smile etched on my face, left to remain in perfect condition and never played with.

And that is what we were, the perfect couple. The happiest couple in the whole wide world. How could anything be wrong?

We were what everyone wanted to be.

No I’ll never be that now but I will get what I truly want.

I don’t think I was ever happy. Maybe I was once but I can’t seem to remember it now.

The earth is cold, wrapping me in a dark embrace, cradled beneath the surface. I wonder if I have a plaque or a headstone? What would it say?

Beloved or Cherished

Forever in Our Hearts

R.I.P

That one always made me laugh.

Confucius said if you are to seek revenge, dig two graves. He was right. And here I rest but not forever.