No one will ever really love you. Don’t forget what you are.
The words strike a chord she has played in her mind for decades in the dark. It echoes in the voice, bounces off the inner curve of her skull and creeps across the walls of her room, molding into a bleak and inescapable shade of truth.
Look at you.
She does. The shadows eat at her flesh, casting her reflection skeletal in the smudged vanity. There she sees the truth, the only one that does not disappear in the light. There, on the other side of the glass, staring at her with empty eyes.
This is what you really are; there’s no room for love in bones.
She thinks for a moment that her heart seizes up, a dramatic actor in a tragedy for the stage, but she knows it is a lie. She doesn’t really have a heart, just bones. She can almost see the harsh curve of her empty ribcage below the fabric of her blouse. She sits on the familiar cushioned bench, trying to concentrate on the comforting feeling of it beneath her, on the cavernous sound of her breathing, but the voice is especially vicious tonight, and will not leave her alone.
You are simply grotesque; you know that, don’t you?
The voice gives a pause, but she is too exhausted to argue tonight. She tries to find something, anything to distract her from the hollow sound of it, but everywhere she turns there is nothing to hold on to. It is the refrain of a song on the radio before a car crash, it is the foot fall of a stranger behind you in the midst of the dark and lecherous night.
Yes, you can’t be quite that stupid… Or are you?
Tears begin to fall from her empty eye sockets. She cannot imagine where they could be coming from, just another glitch in her biology. She thinks of a face she loved once, dappled with sunlight, of the grittiness of salt water and on her cheeks and arms. The way her body sighed with contentment after a meal and how her hands pruned around the small white shells once burrowed in the shoreline as she placed them in her pockets. The way she was held, how laughter and the touch of her parents’ hands had connected her to something larger than words, something that was just known once. It had been so easy then, to believe that she was flesh and blood, that she was human.
Don’t believe in those lies. Where are they now? Memories lie because we are weak and want to see happiness and love where none existed. If it was real, how would you have become so empty? And why would anyone love a thing like you? Don’t forget what you are, do not forget the truth of yourself.
Truth gathers in over her shoulders. She watches as it meanders along her face, gingerly pulling back the remaining skin that was there, so gently that she wonders what she had ever needed it for. She watches the wilting, the last of what she had believed made her who she once was, and she does not feel a thing.
