"Fragile, handle with care"

i) The first time your heart breaks, you're eighteen, young and stupid and naive and you'll wonder why no one ever warned you that something so delicate could so easily shatter into a hundred pieces but wait, maybe they did and you just didn't listen.

I bet he told you he loved you as he stripped you down and laid you bare and you spilled your secrets in the middle of the night to the devil who begged you to and the best thing he could do was pretend to listen.

I bet he told you that you were the most beautiful thing he ever laid eyes on and he spun you soft promises that would later turn into sharp lies and all the while, his mind wandered to unholy places that would damn your innocence to hell.

I can guess that he took that little heart of yours and scratched his name into it and he'd play with it night after night, toying, teasing, dangling it just out of your reach as you tried to playfully tug it out of his hands and he'd only dangle it higher and higher, each time just inches from the tips of your fingers. You'd laugh in exquisite ignorance at this game you're both playing but only one of you is winning and it's not you but you've forgotten the rules and you don't care if he's breaking them.

And I can bet my life that one night, as you bathed in his glorious, undivided attention, not noticing a thing amiss, he just...let it drop. It slipped as he loosened his vice-like grip, tired (bored?) of the game that he can now proudly call his own and you were too slow to catch it.

You'll wonder why God never gifted you that delicate little thing in a box wrapped in gold paper, tied with a shiny red bow and a label saying "fragile, handle with care", but if He had, would you have listened? Would he? See, the devil was never one for listening.

It will slowly crack, straight down the middle and that sound will resonate with deafening silence as you splinter from the inside out. You will feel, deep in your bones, the echoes of the fragments as they explode into nothing and you are suddenly wracked with a pain so intense, you wonder why the world hasn't stopped to mourn your undoing, why the clocks are not standing still until you piece yourself together when all you know is the imprint of your cheek against the cool tiles of the bathroom wall where the running shower drowns out your stifled sobs as you dig your nails in, hard, trying to tear the devil out from under your skin.

You learn the hard way to never again hand it over to the devil who comes to you wearing another face.

ii) No one ever told you that the world could break you more than the devil ever could.

Sixteen is sweet because candied dreams and the beginnings of life make you dizzy with undiluted happiness. "The world is your oyster" they tell you but what they don't tell you is that you're living on borrowed time and before you can blink the oyster snaps shut, trapping with it the hopes you had painted in gold dust. With time, it'll start to filter out, clinging to the air with nostalgia and painful longing.

You're high on the promise of a world always on your side, of a universe always conspiring for you and not against you, of winds that sway the sails to the promised land but then the drug drains out of your system and your weary body will hate the world and question the universe and curse the winds that keep knocking you off your feet.

Your bones will rattle with the constant ache of regrets and lost chances and the doors that slam shut time and time again. You can't escape the gnawing suspicion that this is it. That you are living in a haunted house that feeds on the fear of lost time and is filled with the trinkets of empty promises, crushed dreams and failures that are stacked up like old books on a broken bookshelf.

Do what you love, love what you do was a myth absent from your childhood. Fairytales became nightmares and the soft caress of lullabies became the dull thunk of nails in the coffin as you put your dreams to rest. RIP.

You swallow the bitter pill of defeat as you act out the scenes of the life they have penned for you but what on earth happened to writing your own chapters - I guess the skill of your own hand doesn't count for much.

The biting temptation to crown your selfish happiness itches beneath your skin but you struggle to liberate it while figures of authority are stuffing their supposed wisdom down the back of your throat and you are paying the price.

You are exhausted from sweeping the shards of your soul under the carpet as the illusions of the life you dream of, collide and shatter and there isn't enough patience or strength to go around and so that steady organ that breathes life into you, slows and starves of resilience.

Broken wings are harder to heal than broken hearts.




iii) Some days, your knees will buckle and hit the ground and you will know that the world has you beat.

You are tired of entertaining the people who waltz in and out of your life at liberty, singing their promises composed from tuneless sincerity and sugar-coated proclamations of love that turn to acid.

The people you handpick to reside in your home can only dig their claws into you and suck you dry; that home chills you to the bone as the cold winds blow into the little pockets now slowly collecting dust, that have been inhabited and cleared out by the dwellers who either slowly chip away at the reflection you no longer recognise when you look in the mirror, or who force your hand when they fill you with poison, so you kick them out, promising yourself that you'll bolt the front door and hide away the key.

But you forget and leave it open anyway. The door swings madly, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and it drives you crazy but you still can't bring yourself to slam it shut.

Don't you see? The world is only as cold and disappointing as the people in it.




iv) It's 3:42am. The breeze is whispering through my open window and my room is painted by the subdued glow of the faint twilight hues filtering through the quiet darkness that has been listening to my desperate prayers. Just as it's done the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that.

I wonder if it's tired of hearing my silent cries. I wonder if it senses the void that has me hollowed out from the inside, like calling to like. I wonder if it tires of breathing in my turmoil, lifting it into nothingness as if it weighs as little as air.

Because in the deepest hour of the darkest night, I feel myself fraying at the edges, literally breaking into pieces and I am cradling the glass splinters in my bloodied hand and I wonder if it's always been like this. 

If my heartbeats tally the minutes in which I am bleeding out searching for...something. 

I feel it sometimes. In the stillness of the night it's almost tangible. As my whispers ascend from the ground to the seven heavens, I find it. 

It almost makes the breaking worth it.