When I was broken

I cried fallen star tears that sputtered on their way down the terrain of my cheeks and died.

I stared at the ground with glass eyes that had spider-web chasms splintering through the centre of hurricane irises and black-hole pupils.

My skin shattered like porcelain whenever curious fingers probed the breaches cleaved into delicate pastel wrists.

When I was broken

I sewed the mismatched pieces of my soul together into a patchwork quilt, worn with fraying edges.

The purple half-moons under my eyes became shadows that looked like feather bruises against a pallid beach-wood face that was mottled with imperfections.

When I was broken

My demons broke free from their bastille and provoked earthquakes in the cities of my mind.

The thoughts that stampeded through my head left gorges and dust in their wake, and I was left coughing black smoke from the fire that burned in my lungs.

When I was broken

My heart fluttered in exhaustion, its ventricles died black from the spilled ink that was diffused into catacomb veins from all the hours of writing and bleeding ink into thin pages.

For, when I was broken

I spoke to the Devil, and he slit my throat with truths that I turned away from blindly, only to stitch me up with hellish words, Pompeii fires burning in his eyes. And I looked pathetically up at him when his words curled around my face in tongues of smoke for he breathed;

“Don’t you worry sweet child, for both you and I know that no matter how much the world loathes you, you will always despise yourself more.”

“No one hates you more than you.”

 

I actually wrote this piece a while ago, and it is interesting to see how different my life is now, from when I wrote this. This piece speaks to the monsters that stopped living under our beds and started living inside of us at a certain age. Monsters that can be hard to keep under control. Monsters that can be hard to silence.

I think that this theme also speaks to our many class discussions on childhood innocence, for the day that we realise that our demons will e with us forever is not usually a happy day. Although, saying that, it is almost more of a build-up;

It starts out with you deciding that your nose is too big. You don’t like your nose because it doesn’t look like your best friend’s. However, that thought is only for a fraction of a second, and then you forget about it because your mum promised you ice cream after dinner, and 5-year-old-you LOVED ice cream. That thought stays with you, at the very back of your mind, only making a noise when you are feeling sad or doubtful. It takes advantage of you in your moments of weakness, but is silenced when you feel better. But then you realise that other people don’t like you because you’re a freak. 11-year-old-you doesn’t know how to handle people not liking you, because you didn’t do anything to make them not like you–you were just being yourself. Every time you speak in class, or hang out with your friends, you worry that you are making things worse for yourself. You worry that you aren’t good enough, that everyone secretly hates you because, after all, you are such a freak. But then, later on, that festers into a wound that won’t heal, because it is your fault that you are this way. It is your fault tat you are a freak. It is your fault that you are not good enough. And, it is in that moment, the moment in which not even you can stand yourself anymore–it is in that moment that the demons grow and multiply. It is a build up of things that happen, and while some people might think that you should just let it go, you can’t because you hate who you are and it is your fault. Everything metastasises into something too big for you to control, and then you find yourself doubting everything about yourself because you just can’t do anything right.

Sometimes, we just wish that our heads would shut up, because we don’t have anything kind to say to ourselves. Because, maybe we are afraid to be kind to ourselves.

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