Post by Moxie James on Mar 22, 2021 19:39:10 GMT -5
I battle with a god inside my brain
A torment into taught, a school of pain
We say "forget me not" but we still fade to dust
Compare, compare, compare, combust
Can't shake my shadow off, I'm tasting pennies
I tried to cut it out but it won't let me
Scrolling the clutter now, a mindless tapping
I still can't seem to feel a thing
A torment into taught, a school of pain
We say "forget me not" but we still fade to dust
Compare, compare, compare, combust
Can't shake my shadow off, I'm tasting pennies
I tried to cut it out but it won't let me
Scrolling the clutter now, a mindless tapping
I still can't seem to feel a thing
She sat, naked and shivering, in the empty porcelain bowl of the tub. Dark smudges under her eyes and cottonmouth from hell.
Had she slept?
She didn’t feel like she had. Or maybe she didn’t feel like she hadn’t. She balanced on a curious line between exhausted and wired. Leaning forward, a flick of her wrist had the water sluicing down her back in burning rivulets. Her body felt foreign as she chased the chill from her bones with heat and steam.
It had taken her too long when she’d woken up to piece together what had happened last night. It had taken her too long to fit herself back into her body in the right way.
It was just the isolation, she reminded herself. That old pretty lie. She’d been in Japan for half the year but she barely spoke the language and while that worked for fumbled hookups it did not work for making friends. She woke up alone, she trained alone and she ate alone.
Then she went to bed alone and started the whole thing again.
It hadn’t felt bad.
Not at first.
Until she’d realized that stepping back into the world she’d loved and missed was… it wasn’t as easy as stepping out of it had been. The current moved too fast now for her to grab on.
And under that isolation she could feel herself cracking.
Each disappointment was a crack.
Down the spine of who and what she was.
She left wet foot prints down the hallway as she emerged from her shower and the cool air welcomed her.
It was the wanting that had started that cracking maybe. Wanting to be more than what the world was content to allot her with. Wanting to be included. Wanting to be wanted. Wanting to have people she could call her own.
“Hello, little liar,” her reflection purred from the sliver of her reflection in the faucet as she made herself some coffee in the French press. She’d already covered up all of the mirrors…
But only because she didn’t want to see her own tired, haggard expression and those tear swollen eyes. Only that and definitely not because her reflection still whispered things that she didn’t want to hear.
It was just… a bad night of drinking.
Just a shitty hangover.
And not the edges of her sanity snapping and breaking and unraveling…
...Right?
“Right!” from the sliver of her reflection staring back at her from the handle of the electric kettle.
No.
From her.
Life felt strangely anti-climactic now that all of her villains were dead. Now that she didn’t have to look over her shoulder every time she stepped outside. But now what was left of her?
Pieces of her had crumbled and fallen away when she’d woken up in Mexico, dirt in her mouth and a gun barrel at the back of her head. They’d made her an offer and she’d refused it and she’d paid for it. Gods, had she paid for it. They’d rolled her beaten body onto the side of a road and left her there.
“Because that’s the way it always ends when you’re stupid enough to get involved with a cartel,” her right eye said from where it was reflected in that stupid silver tab that had broken off of her pen and now lay on the table top.
Not wrong, maybe. She’d made a series of almost comically bad mistakes. And she would have done it all again if it meant the same outcome. Her mistakes had paid for his rehab. It had meant he had a future now, brighter than either of them had dreamed when they’d been kids.
The brother who she had raised… yeah, she would martyr herself a thousand more times in a million more ways for him. He was family but now…
The problem was that now that she had torn herself apart to make sure that he had a future she wasn’t sure she fit in with him anymore either. He stared at her like a thing he didn’t quite recognize these days.
Her fault, after all. She’d drawn away from everyone who still reached out. Royal and Zion and Bianca and Lucie. She hated the isolation but she’d put herself in it. She’d ruined herself so much she wasn’t sure how to be human anymore.
Part of her had rotted and festered those months she’d spent healing and then rehabbing her destroyed left ankle in Mexico. Alone, because she didn’t know how to ask for help. Alone because she’d finally realized that closeness to her was dangerous. After what those men had wanted her to give them…
She’d ripped herself apart to keep her lover and her brother safe and it had been enough but it had also been too much. The things that she had seen and the things that had been done on her behalf and even though she’d never spilled a drop of it herself it felt like there was always the ghost of blood on her hands.
“What did you expect? Oh, wait, you thought this was a love story,” the corner of her mouth said from where it reflected off of the back of the spoon she half heartedly stirred her cereal with. “You thought that Zion would just wait around until you could tell him the truth, pining after you, instead of immediately jumping into a relationship with some bitch with two whole brain cells in her head like a month after that. That was dumb.”
She was fractured and fracturing, in a constant state of flux. Her pieces straining to fly apart apart apart. Moxie James swallowed hard and tugged all those errant pieces back to their places, fixing a curl that had fallen out of her messy bun. What was she? What did she have left?
All those good, soft parts of her had turned sour and bitter over the past who knew how long. Had it really been a year of her haunting the wrestling ring and lingering on the edges of this whole scene. Not really a part of it but trying to be.
Once as a kid she’d read a book about a brother and a sister who didn’t know they were dead and it had scared the fuck out of her. But now… now she sometimes wondered if maybe she hadn’t died in that baked earth and she hadn’t realized it.
So she’d tried to come back and fit into this life but now the only time she felt alive was when someone was hitting her or when she was coming.
What was she now?
Now that she had dismantled herself to create a shelter from her bones and flesh for everyone she cared about?
She tried to remember how to smile, reminded herself it was just a hangover.