Maximalist

Her hair is a dream catcher of frozen memories, concealed grade nine trauma covered by a mess of external toughness like a thousand hit-men covering her impenetrable skin. She looks at me with a fiery glint in her eyes and I know that she isn’t hearing a word of what I’m saying, that the words are just running through her taper-plugged ears like the vodka she swirls around her throat. The baby pink skin of her esophagus is scratched and raw from countless cigarettes, the marks echoing on her forearms where she danced with a sharp monster a few too many times. I chased away my monsters but she is forced to surrender to hers, caught up in a riot of demons pummeling her into the sidewalk. Her eyes are marbles, reflecting the storms and tears and dramatic nights of screaming and crying and praying that she won’t leave me here to chase away all these monsters by myself. I tell myself that she was the one to drag me into this, that it was against my will, but then again, didn’t I ask for this? I let myself into her world with the key that she handed to me and I never looked back at the reality that I was leaving behind because I loved her more than any real world. I couldn’t let her go through this alone. Her lips are frost-bitten strawberries, whispering sugary sweet lies as I look out the window and pretend to believe her. She looks at me with fear in her eyes, fear for the delicate strand of whisper-fine hair that is her life, the fragile, iridescent beauty that she is slowly crushing in her fist, a lullaby suicide. She is walking the fine line between sanity and losing it and she isn’t doing a great job. She keeps tipping over the edge and begging me to catch her every time she scares herself. I’m always there to pick up her shattered pieces. I’m always there to glue her back together and tell her that it will all be okay. But as she pops ecstasy with her Prozac and washes them both down with her trusted 2/6 of Vodka, I find it harder and harder to expel from my lips the lies that she craves so desperately. What happens when you’re gone? What happens when the memory of you in my mind is just a memory, fading into the blackness of your grave and you really are six feet under? What happens when everything I’m terrified of turns into reality and the monsters finally win? I can’t let them win. I can’t let them take you, so I’ll fight with all my strength and every ounce of sweat, blood, and tears and I won’t give up until the monster bites me because my scars have healed and I’m almost two years removed from that blade. I won’t sacrifice that for you because then we’ll be back where we were in grade nine, fighting for each other’s breath and hoping and praying that we will not be conquered. You were always the one to pick up my pieces and now that the roles are reversed, I feel like I’m not doing a good enough job of holding your head above water. You’re slipping through my fingers, gasping for breath and screaming my name with every interval of oxygen that fills your lungs as your ribcage expands, contracts, expands. Hush, now, don’t make a sound as you slip from my fingers because I can’t keep fighting for you. You said we would be living in the concrete jungle in a year and a half but you can’t live in New York if you’re dead, can you?