SILENT THOUGHTS
Some things you just don’t speak out loud. Those things have become the centre of me. Those quiet words I was too afraid to admit were my dreams and those roaring moments where I couldn’t subscribe to my body in any form, drift over me and hold me up. They become my bone. They become my fracture. I feel my losses like it was the first time. I fear that this feeling will be eternal and found a little right of my breast where I think the heart is. I’m not sure of anything, but it lives there. It all lives in there, somewhere underneath my chest cavity.
You write no good when you read no good and you think no good when you talk no good. But I’ve been drinking, I’m good, I make me good, you’ve got to know it. I have known it my whole life that the best heroes die on the road. She wasn’t a hero. She was mean. Nadine was mean. She was my mother and mean. But she was sick and I didn’t know she was that sick, so I was mean. I was her daughter and I was mean. You’re no good, this makes you no good. She never thought I was any good either.
They had no money. My father was always quiet and my mother was always cleaning. The only body I was allowed to see at her funeral was the one in the black bag. My woman’s body wasn’t allowed near all the men at the grave. They made me go back to school later, I didn’t know how to be. He started hitting me now that he couldn’t hit her. They almost took us away, when I couldn’t cope anymore. He was in the back of a police car and then he came home. No one was going to help me. It’s never changing, I’m never changing. I'm never better.
My fingers crawled down my throat, all of those dragons and none of my courage. That day when he tried to hit me in front of his new wife, I knew that there was no one there for me but me. I bit my dad. You should’ve seen his eyes. My dragons were never killed with courage. I shower whenever it goes bad, clean from it.
I’ve never left my city, it’s so wide. I never sleep, my thoughts are so wide. I never speak. They don’t listen to me. It never ends and it never changes. My ambition is a body innocent of nothing. Don’t you know it all pits up inside of you, a little right of your left breast, beating beating beating. Or at least I think that's the side. It’s the side Jaime touched before he told me he had a girl at home so I went home. The next time I stayed. I told him I was used to living life out in hotel rooms, I didn’t have a home for 3 months when I was eleven. It all burnt down.
I knew some birds. When I was younger, before all of this, I would talk to them as friends. They would never talk but sometimes they would bang at my window and so I’d look and they’d be gone. At one point I think they were following me, I saw them on top of the roof above where the old man lived. I saw him with his coffee every morning. It burnt down. You wouldn’t notice now but I do, it’s the only one with the double panel windows that open inwards. They don’t come out anymore but I saw one on the day they said she was too sick. Before the life support stuff, when she really died, I think she died lonely.
I am sitting in a hotel room, disappearing. He has left. Often I think that death is a pilgrim who rides a car kind of like James Dean on this giant road. And it’s a sun like it was borrowed from the good parts of hell that it poured over the road. Then I imagine the pilgrim finding a dreamer walking the pavement and stopping. I imagine the car ride is quiet and that the road is eternal. Sometimes I imagine those who resist and I suppose for them the pilgrim waits until they understand that they were bound to stop anyways.
When I go home, my father will tell me that I am strange and that he knows because I am like him. I will say that it is only half of me. I will notice his shirt with the hole in the collar and then the pieces of food on the floor. I watch all of his loneliness and think that he too is disappearing. But then he will walk up to my mothers room where his new wife sits. I will forget.
One day I will be 43 and dead. I will have died afraid. I will have died convinced my words were never extraordinary. My husband will remarry 9 weeks later. He will not be kind to our sixteen year old daughter. One day I will be my mother and I will forgive it all. Today I am young; I am dreaming that I’m better, that I can be good.
Marghlara, 18, London - UK ✯