Take Me Back to Yesterday

“This is his mother.
Please call me.”
Twenty hours of tortured silence-
Broken.

The gleam from the screen shone on my face,
my skin rivaling a sick Victorian child’s.
I stared.
The digital script somehow dripped sludge,
thick ink rolling across my thumbs.
Silent.
I knew this conversation.
I didn’t want it.
I was already tortured by the lingering dread,
beaten by it.
My fingers finally submitted,
jabbing at the numbers violently,
a stu-stu-stuttering SOS pattern.

The droll tone interrupted by a weak voice:
“Is this Honeybadger?”
I choked.
Laughter halted in my throat.
“I think you should sit down...”
I was sitting—so instead I stood,
spine locked,
a literal badger,
Cornered.
Feral.
“he's, uhm… he’s gone.”

The denial burst out of my chest—
No…
a useless spell cast without landing.
No. No...? NO!

A seizure had taken him.
And I could not drag him back.
His brittle heart permanently still.


---

But, but—yesterday…
Yesterday he was here.
Vapid sheets.
Cold.
His imprint no longer nestled in the down.

Yesterday was simple.
Sandwiches wrapped in paper,
movies flickering against tired walls.
Half-naked dances.
Off-beat serenades.

I wore my cave goblin crown proudly.
he smirked—
a pretty cave goblin.

I swallowed the urge to call him back when the real world beckoned him home.
The darkness was already waiting,
already sharpening
its teeth.

Promises of “sweet sleep” and “dirty dreams”
were wished haphazardly,
They would be the last.


---

The habitual morning greeting never came.
Eerie silence.
I stabbed at the emptiness with a joke:
…hey man, are you dead?

A corpse of a sentence I will drag forever.
Electric goosebumps force limp strands to stand at attention.
The stomachs of my fingertips drop,
leaving me gutted.

…?
Nothing.
Seriously—are you okay?
Nothing.
Nothing.

Then… something.

His mother’s message rallied all day.
It brought torches and pitchforks.
Orange fire glittered at my feet, climbing higher.
But its light couldn’t disguise the scars.
Couldn’t cauterize the wound.


---

Disbelief echoed off my ribcage as the emptiness grew.
Tugged the tangled threads from my heart.

Bones like shards of glass, unrelenting
As my knees met the cold tile.
Throat salt-burned by screams
my lungs could not contain.

“I was FINALLY getting better..."

A rancid plea, covered in rot.

I had been stripped of a part of my soul—
the only person who had taken
This flimsy felt puppet
and taught it to walk and talk.

No longer hopeless or helpless,
crazy or chaotic.
Mismatched patchwork sewn together,
perfectly imperfect.

Now… gone.
Unapologetically taken,
from a world he once found too harsh.


---

I keep replaying that painfully plain day—
our exclusive gremlin world.
No password. No entry.

I would trade anything to sit
in that smallness again.

But memories don’t give back.
Not this one, anyway.
It stays an open gash—
scabbing, tearing,
never healing.

Until I almost forget
which one of us is the ghost.
Which voice belongs to shadows and silence.
Which of us cannot wake.
Which one—