cwilling9

[cwilling9]

I wonder what she can see from so high up

You know the house at the end of the street? The one with the fading blue paint and the whisper of ghosts in the cracks of the sidewalk?

A girl called perfection lives there.

We’ve never been formally introduced, but I begin and end each day to the glow of her headlights as she travels to and from where she thinks she is meant to be. Some nights, that light tastes a bit like nostalgia and orange peels and it's hard not to get swept up in the undertow.

I once knew another girl called perfection. She walked decisively through life, clearing entire canyons with a single stride. Some walls would rise to the occasion, raising their hulking bodies far into the sky in defiance of her aspirations. In those instances, she would simply look down at her legs and command them to grow, and like trees, their branches would carry her up to unimaginable heights. She captained her ship in a way that left no room for discussion or indecision. Her future was entirely her own.

Sometimes I worry for that girl called perfection. Her soul burned so hot that it was only a matter of time till she burned up to nothing. In the afternoon, she would reach so far out her window that I feared she would one day lose her balance and fall to be swallowed up by the ground below. Even diamonds can shatter when dropped from great heights.

Many despise a girl called perfection. Well, many despise a girl called most anything, though there is a particular ire reserved for girls who can command the attention of the world. Maybe I should have been less worried that she would fall from her window, and more worried that someone would come along to push her.

It’s a lonely life for a girl called perfection. Very few people can breathe the air at altitudes that high or see when the sun shines so bright.

Very few people try.

I am quite far from a girl called perfection. I’ve got alabaster eyes and paper thin lungs and I fear heights almost as much as I fear the ground. My words don’t run hot, they instead flow out and around me, little streams and puddles of sound. I think we could make a great pair.

Maybe today I’ll go meet this girl called perfection. What is perfection anyway? Can perfection laugh and smile and spin in circles when no-one is watching? I’ve seen her walk her dog once or twice, balancing along the cracks in the concrete like a tight-rope walker. It's in those quiet moments that the perfection is shed like a winter coat, to be picked up when she inevitably must turn around at the end of the block. Is the perfection really discarded, though? Or is it simply there the entire time, walking along the cracks with her? I’ll have to ask her later.

You know, I think her name might be Natalie.

[cwilling9]

Songs Can Sound Like Eulogies, But Only if You Let Them

In the quiet of the night, as I make the long trek back to my apartment from work, my thoughts sometimes drift to her. I can go months or even years between sightings, but her ghost is surprisingly persistent.

The irony is that most of the time I’m not thinking of her. I’m thinking of you. Which is pretty tragic, since you are the one who took her from me.

Maybe she only can break into my thoughts during the darkest parts of the day, because that is the last time I can remember seeing her face. In a quiet field, in a quiet town, you walked up to her.

And then she violently faded away.

Should I really blame you though? You were so young at the time - could you have really known what you were doing? It's those questions that the more forgiving version of myself whispers into the cracks of my brain, before a boiling and billowing rage consumes the whole in screaming condemnation.

Because yes, you were young.

But she was young too.

And you had no right to take her from me.

She was the most vibrant girl I knew. She bounded from life to life, spreading her spark to all those she met. I know that she just wanted that spark to catch and be sent back in equal measure. I regret that I didn’t have the courage to be that for her.

She deserved the world. 

And instead she met you.

At this moment I have to indulge my darker thoughts, or I fear they will eat me alive, consuming what I must protect that is growing inside me. Your ghosts do not get to take that from me too. Because, like her, you are only a ghost now. Adrift in my memory. But I do remember what you were like in life - brash, bold, and unflinchingly you. Or were you really? Years later I can barely tell if it was all a facade. You were so alike her in some ways, and so different in others. Maybe the two of you could have been friends in another life. But you had already caught the sickness. The one that only survived on the consumption of others.

Then she came to town. And you were hungry.

You know, for years I thought that you killed her. I thought that in that single moment in late October, you reached into her small and fluttering heart and wrung its neck. 

For years, I lived in mourning. I lived in silence. It was a quiet life, it was a lonely life. How does one introspect without their soul. Without their mind. Without their heart? She was music to me.

It wasn’t till years later that I finally realized how sharp the quiet really was, and that she didn’t die on that dark field all alone. It was those daggers of silence that pierced her still softly beating heart the deepest.

You may have left her broken and bloodied on the ground, but I am the one who left her to die.

It wasn’t until I had this final realization that her ghost stopped haunting me at night. A spector merged into my soul, filling in the cracks that you had once occupied. I now know that by holding on to you, I had let go of her. So it is here that I will say goodbye.

That festering discontent that I will never be able to shake, the one that both destroys and creates in equal measure, has tried to whisper to me that I shouldn’t let you get away unscathed. You need to answer to the world for what you have done.

You need to answer to me.

But, without purging this feeling from my gut, she will never feel safe within me. And she deserves to finally return to rest in the place that once was her home.

I may never be able to be who I once was. After all, we can’t become our ghosts. But, we can live at peace with them. And if ghosts have ears and hearts that beat, I’d like to leave a message for mine.

You deserved the world. I envy your spark and your hunger and the way that you could hold a quiet thing in the palm of your hand. You were messy and tilting and sharp, but you were mine. Then the demons got to you, and I didn’t protect you, and I am sorry. I am so so sorry. I will love you till the end of my days, and I will die trying to love myself in equal measure. You, my little thunder girl, are now the thunder in me.