She Is

She is tears falling down freckled cheeks, and veins showing through skin stretched taut. She is a capsule; a  beautiful, tragic shell crammed full of words and melodies and bits of driftwood. She is amber eyes sizzling and foaming with spite and loathing. She is white shadows in the darkness, and newly fallen snow, tainted, like innocence lost before it has had time to bloom.

She wears red. It is her punishment, her sin, her attempt at forgiveness (retribution), her constant reminder that sometimes evil defeats good. She pours her entire soul into paintings; spewing her emotions onto wall-length canvases and smearing them into macabre metaphors that remind her of hope spattered with blood.

She is bones shifting beneath shaking hands and fingers wrapped in ribbons; a clever mind reduced to gray matter spotted with rotten, insidious blackness. She is a calendar turned to January in the hopes that time will flow faster; she is a watch with only one hand, because seconds are all she cares about anymore.

She hides behind bitterness and walls not-quite-thick-enough, listening to a mother's heartbroken sobs and a father's uncertain comfort, wishing she could be anyone but herself. And when the rain falls, she composes symphonies that no one will ever hear, because the music only exists within her bent and bereaved soul; she covers her ears and grovels at the feet of the storm, humming, chanting, screaming, twisting melodies into murderous raptures.

She is tired, oh so very tired everymomentofeverydayofeverymonthofeveryyear, and she simply does not want to function anymore. She wants to sink through the ground and drown in the musky scent of earth. She dreams of finally disappearing, and also of finally being found - because, more than anything, she just wants the truth to be discovered.

She grieves sometimes, and no one is left who understands why. On certain days she coils deep within herself, paralyzed by something she feels inside, and sometimes, late at night, you can hear her weeping. In the morning, she denies it all - all that weakness - and slams the door between your two souls, defiant eyes glimmering. She will never let anyone in.

She is strength and initiative and grief buried within a chasm of a heart. She is beautiful, wonderful, cynical. She is a member of a scattered family, living in a house built for one too many, sleeping in a room that used to hold three. She is cough-medicine taken to numb the pain, and doctors visits that should never have been scheduled. She is gorgeous, treacherous like the sea after a storm; she is a hurricane, wrenching doors from their frames and eroding smiles from faces.

She is fierce, spiteful, beautiful in her agony.

She is all-consuming; her fear and anger and angression devouring everything in her path. She is a dark, festid cloud; she will freeze you to death if you touch her.

She clings to things, sometimes: memories, picture frames, items of sentiment that seem lost to her. She wants to feel again: something more than anguish and guilt.

She speaks to me, shrieks riddles and rhymes and rotten bits of French conjugations, and I write it all, because she is magnificent in the way of hurricanes. She lances my eyes with flashbacks, then buckles beneath her own fear, and covers my irises with viscous lies. She tells me stories, hands me memories that don't hurt so bad anymore.

But still, she has not told me her name.