Looking around. The sunlight burns hot around me and I almost don't see it, the heat of July dripping down in a sour-sickly, watery-sticky concoction. Around me the world tilts and lilts as my head spins. The blazing gold-green of the ground burns my eyes as I breathe in dry-hot dust. I look up directly into the sun. Oh how it burns, how it burns, how it burns. White-hot and flame-bright.
And it tumbles down my throat, into my stomach, my chest, leaving ripped, bloody epithelial tissue as I'm bleeding, bleeding, bleeding from the inside. And it's almost enough. Almost enough to quell the poisonous dead ocean of gasoline and kisses and coal dust and peppermint that pulls me under, under, under. Almost. I breathe in the dust all around me and it burns my bleeding throat. And I close my eyes. And lean in. It's not safe. Not safe anymore. But it's me.
I can stand up. I can be stronger than the heavy, empty waves filled with screaming, squamous things. I don't want. Loki help me. Loki give me strength. I look up. And it means nothing. Do you want me to ... do you want me to restart?
I do. I know you do Loki. I know you do mother. I know you do papa. I know you do, all my grandmothers and grandfathers and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters. Who I share no blood with, only love, only need, only wisdom and experience and misery. I want to.
I want to but I won't. There's no petrichor and ring-necked doves.There's no frigid gasping waves dumping your body on a sandy shore where you cough up blood and salt water and sea shells and live crabs as you are warmed by the glaring sun. There is just this. A speck of black mould in an uncaring universe that spins and swirls around you as it engulfs you in a cigarette-smoke night too dark for words, for comprehension. There are no angel wings, no sunrise rays, no first snows. Just sleet that melts the second it hits the warmth of the city concrete. Your eyes have a hardness to them. As do your hands. As do your teeth, which are ever hungry, always searching. You look up. Look up. Look up. You know that you don't have the right to lift your head after all you've done, all you've been through. But nonetheless you look up. What are there? Stars? Cosmic insignificance? Is it the roiling eternity of the ever-expanding jaws of space drenched in their inky blackness and neon stars? Is it hope? Is it dread? Is it despair?
You were always meant to be the terror that swallows everything whole. The rending teeth that none find their way out of. The piercing stab against flesh, the splintering of bone. You were never meant for anything more. You never truly wanted anything more. This is your destiny. Your choice. Your life upon the altars of deep, twisted, horrible gods who do not allow you to speak their names. Just seek them. Seek them. Seek them.
Rage. Terror. Violence. But not from you, never from you you tell yourself as you crush pathetic weak helpless mortals around your claws. No. No it is from them. Tear drops and absinthe and and hemlock intermingle in your hands and you drink. And you are pulled under, under, under. And you lose yourself to that night. That night without ending, without stars.
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