Dead And Dreaming
Sometimes it hurts.
The blue of it blinds you and surrounds you, fills your mouth and weighs down your lungs. It's like drowning in density and sinking in fog. It's like gasping for air and inhaling nitrogen. It's like the tiniest of molecules freezing and turning your blood to frost-bitten strawberries, pulpy and iced over.
It's a direct hit, a stab to the brain and a slice at the heart. It's a scream that skitters along your soul and holds you hostage in dreams that bleed. It's waking up with the sheets wrapped around your body as though they'd been painted on because your skin is so damp they adhere and become transparent and sticky.
It's the realization that you could cut yourself open and let your insides spill out and they wouldn't notice a thing. It's the knowledge that everything you see is invisible to them, because they don't want to see it. Because they don't want to know that you know.
It's a tangle, really, a twist of emotions and a blue so bright you lose focus, lose sight of everything near to you. The center, your focal point, dissolves like sugar in water, and when the sugar-silt lies at the bottom, it begins to reassemble, and it re-forms into something you'd never thought possible. Or maybe you did, and it's merely that you'd been told it wasn't supposed to be that way, that you could change it, defend yourself against it. Maybe you'd known all along, and managed to delude yourself that you were stronger.
It's losing beauty in slow, acid drops and not even knowing there was anything to lose, because it'd always been there and it wasn't something you thought could actually be lost. And it's opening your eyes and not feeling the slightest spark when you encounter greys, white on black where there should've been...
And it's nothing. It's a grey so dark and vivid, so painful that it feels like a hook hacking into your chest, digging in and twisting things around so your heart is in your stomach. It's knowing that the grey had been something else before, something so awesome it hurt to look at it.
It's forgetting what had come before and seeing only the dark, only the slashes of black on the canvas.
It's that niggling feeling that something is wrong, that there had been something once, something you'd known and yet...
There's nothing. Just black on white and grey on black. It's drab and stark, so stark it's almost, almost-
But then you see an argument, a raised hand and a wineglass, and shards of white that glitter dully on the floor, and then there's a raised hand and a wineglass, a tinkle as it falls and breaks and the shards are white on the floor.
They gleam like polished plastic, and when you reach down to pick up the pieces, you cut yourself and you notice, as the others flutter and fold like wingless butterflies, that you don't bleed.
Or maybe you do, and you don't see it, because you're just so busy trying to save yourself.