Totenklage

[Nullia]

How many flowers.

How many graves.

There was, I'm sure, a precipice at some point.
A cliff, clearly defined, impossible to miss.
But when you're spinning, falling, plummeting towards the ground—
—it's not easy to look up, again.
I must have tripped.
Surely so.

I feel it still. The dissolution of my self.
A doll, a puppet, or whatever other thing I may be.
I feel the strings around my limbs getting tighter. Not out of strength, but out of desperation.
To keep me up. To keep dancing and clapping like a good toy.
Because these strings know that if they snap,
if I fall,
we're both going to burn in the fire.

I feel it still. The dissolution of my self.
Taught, snapping. Threads run thin.
What starts the fire, I wonder? That is lit underneath me.
That is lit around me.
That lights me.
What starts the fire, I wonder?
When these strings snap, when the fabric of my body comes undone—
—do I collapse, and die? Does all that I am cease to be?
Do I break under the pressure? Living a hollow, ignorant life I don't enjoy,
until I stop struggling to do what I couldn't the day she died?

Or

are these chains, that bind me?

My limbs bloody and scarred from pulling against them,
until they just,


snap?




How many graves am I going to visit?
I've started not to care.
I feel it. Every day. The hammer that is this violent world, beating down on me.
On my will. My mind. My soul. Even my body, until it is a struggle to escape the confines of my bed.
Wearing me down—no, shaping me up.
Into something that suits it.
Long have I felt that desire in my heart. Scared was I to confront it. What it meant. What it represented.
No more, I professed to him. I will use it. This desire of mine. I will wield it, as I have wielded all else.

But the farther my fingers reach,

the more I feel like I'm going to lose them.

The strings that bind my body, the strings that hold up my mask—
—I feel them snap with each passing day,

As this sentient garbage believes it can talk back to me.
Is this some kind of joke?
I do all of this work,
just for more shit to wash up on the southern shore.

I stand in defiance of this reality. I deny all that it is. I deny all that it represents.
They tell me,
                          they tell me,
that I'm strong. That I'm doing something no one else can.

Why?

What is it all for?



Ah, that's it, isn't it?
It's not what.
It's who.
This city is going to be the death of me.



This world toils to break me.
It has once before.
I picked up the pieces, tied my strings, and bound myself to the whims of the gods yet again.
Like an obedient little dog, I chain myself to my fate.
To let it toy around with me 'till I break again.


I've read this book before.
It's a slow-burn romance.
The producer shut down. The author's been dead six years.
I know what it did to me last. I know what it will do to me now.
It will destroy all that I am.

My fingers clasp the pages,
and I stare deeply into the words on the final page.
"I love you"
it tells me.
I know how this story ends.

And yet here I am,
on my knees,
begging for it to kill me again.

'Till my strings snap a second time.


And I truly come undone.