She, Soft And Alone
By Me

Tearing at the walls again, nighttime just beyond the windows, nostalgia just past that. She, the girl that matters until pretty girls slide by. She, the girl made of other people’s smiles and the sounds made after rain. These walls have tasted paint and words and angry drawings of old friends and now they’re drab with checkered wallpaper, so she rips and pulls until the canvas is free again and ready for the wind of desperation and collusion to pull it on to deeper waters.
“Let go!” These are the words she screams to hear words screamed. Advice to herself or everyone else or the lonely, empty night that kicks outside. Advice to shake the humiliation and the futility, the unreality and to replace it or to leave the puncture bloody and untouched.
“Let go!” She screams to God and all his angels or to Satan who won’t stop just because you ask. She had a father and he left for the blink of city neon and the fly buzz of dying lights, dead coffee meant for passing truckers, cold, foreign beds. He sends letters in invisible ink. He sends matches and scraps from magazines because she always loved to write. She has a box to hide the bits of him in. She says when it fills it’ll be winter and she’ll burn the last of her father to keep herself warm. She says a lot of things.
Today she cut her fingers. It was an accident, but she laughed like it was something she had always known would happen. There are parts of her, way down inside, that whisper that she’s cracking up and falling to pieces. The other parts, the kindly parts, defend her with the logic that there’s no one anywhere to sweep her up again. She mustn’t let her mind slip now, not all alone.
She wasn’t always all alone. The blue eyed boy had been someone to talk to. He had talked, smiled, felt of love for months and he had made her happy where she’d never been happy before. She told him that she was just another girl. He had never believed her. He had a mind that wasn’t made of lust and puppet strings and he would say such things about her! Then the pale-blond-perfect-kissing-wink-smiling-beneath-eyes-as-bright-as-daylight girl arrived and tore him endless worlds away. Though it ached to wake and know this, she will not blame the blue eyed boy. She can’t say why.
“Let go.” She whispers to the stubborn walls that mock in silent challenge. They say I dare you to carve me raw with anger. I dare you to color me regretful and abused. I dare you to do anything more than waste this empty night beneath numb blankets. Shake me-make me human!
And so she pulls the night around her, sketching stars and home made fables, etching old remembered poems and new tragedies, gently, deftly painting all the things she’s left behind until the walls are tapestries of sorrowings. Solemn, she salutes her work of truth with quiet tears, fingers outstretched to touch the darkest, softest bits she hides inside.
With the dawning of a blood red sun comes the dying of the light within and so, used, deserted, unholy, she allows her eyes to close and thoughts to die.