In a different universe the girl succeeded
in her attempt to end it all.
The house she lives in exists
still (how can something disappear
just because someone does?)
Inside: the room she was to move into at 14 remained as a repository of old things. Stock room, storage. Even after the fire. The middle child would not get a room of her own. Not after her sister’s suicide. Tendencies had to be observed. Sadness is a hereditary condition.
The mother always stays in the study, working. She has lines on her face now. They tell her it’s normal, due to age, and sometimes stress. The passing of time. She never tells anyone but she believes the lines are drawn by the ghost of her eldest daughter, who liked to make paintings when alive. Lines upon lines upon lines. She believes the dead would still like to talk, send some signal. Explain their disappearance. Give an answer that was meant to be delivered by the knife, the direction of blood as it streamed out a river from her daughter’s neck.
The youngest child is frequently bullied by the middle sister. Her answer to loneliness lay in the edges of a pair of scissors. Sadness is a hereditary condition and she learns not to ask questions.
The dead girl never left
a single clue.
Journals and sketchbooks alike were burnt. Ashes, scattered in locations only the wind knew. Messages in the mobile phone: erased. Not a single pixel could be coaxed to encode out an acceptable explanation.
Even her friends, one by one: pushed away in the few months prior to her demise.
She made sure to draw lines
around her. Lines thick enough to keep everyone else
from being infected by how sad her body has become.
In this universe, the girl stays
with her sadness and all other conditions
her body is afflicted with.
She attends and tends to each deficiency as she would a flower- watering them daily, diluting the hold of their roots; cutting them with the fine edge of a knife, if there is too much in that invisible garden thriving in her room, presenting them, later on, as gifts to passerby.
The girl believes that if someone refuses to disappear, something else must.
Sadness is a condition you pass on.
So she takes a bud for every bad day and plants it in the heart of a stranger.
Keeping to a safe distance, she waits, watches it bloom.
—
Torrent took forever so I ended up typing this out. Haha. Bored.
). Life’s been extra busy.
