Perhaps I look better when I cry

I found myself thumbing through the yellowing pages of life, ignoring the obligatory small print and choking on my daily doses of ennui and bullshit. The blank space where I used to stand stares back at me with the silent accusation of my weakness. I find it impossible to explain why I let it happen. Why it continues to happen. All the time aware that in the morning we will pretend that everything is fine. I'm the girl screaming at the strobing images of idiots who put themselves into this position and never escape. I call them fools and roll my eyes at their sob-story realities, safe in the knowledge that my own is competition for any of theirs.

Leave Him

It seems stupid to have this high opinion of a system that would allow a woman to walk the streets with a shiner and a bloodied lip. Yet here I am clutching a towel the colour of burnished metal with copper drying in my knotted hair. Sat in a room full of people and the only thing I can hear is my pulse trying to keep my brain alive, keeping me from expiration. I'm clinging to a limestone skeleton that dissolves beneath my acid fingertips and I am a mockery to myself as I try to remember why I bother to hold on.

Like watching TV and crying over the death of a soap character. Detached realism. Something to be pitied from a far. Empathised. I nod and smile and the world functions around me to prove my worthlessness. I am the faux proud, waiting to die or to fall but not wanting everones awareness. I sit here chewing fingernails until they bleed and nobody notices my faultering breaths or gently trembling movements. I'm thinking about whisky in a tumbler filled with ice while watching my cornflakes absorb the milk from my cereal bowl and I'm wondering what it is about me that makes men want to crush me. Perhaps I look better when I cry. Or perahps the strength I portray is so transparent that they love to scratch away the surface and see the broken girl.

 I read these words and I fill with bitter tasting bile and a sickness that I could never explain or wash away. I read these words and have no idea how my fingers can work without my heart. I know the truth. I know that he asked me to leave. He asked me to leave but I lied and said I was happy. Now I don't know where to go and I'm not sure that I care anymore. Life is much easier when someone else is in control and all I have to do is stop when the light turns red.

 All I have to do is stop waiting for it to turn green.