Freshly Dusted

 Hurt

“TAKE IT!” I scream at them. “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”

The screams echo louder across the Wastelands, climbing higher and higher in intensity and ferocity. Gesturing at the empire I’ve built behind me, the massive towers made of sand, I scream louder, “TAKE IT! I don’t want it anymore!”

They howl louder, and behind me, the structure begins to crash, dirt streaming from the cracks in the walls. The towers creak and begin to stream down, the entire empire turning to dust in the face of the Enemy’s atrocity.

Wordless, every shout is. Ferocities I can not hope to keep up with, words that seep into my skin and tear me down from the inside. They used to hear my voice, they used to heed my cry, but those days have ended now.

“YOU LISTEN TO ME!” I shout, but they don’t. I cry out, knees buckling and slamming me face-first into the streaming piles of dirt.

This is it, I think. This is where I get buried alive by the weight of my universe. I’ve never wanted to be buried. All I’ve ever wanted is to die by flame— why is that?

Why is that, why is that, why is that? The voices echo.

It’s not your fault, I tell myself.

It’s always your fault. You’re accountable for your own actions.

But what if someone forced you to make those actions?

They’re still my actions. My decision. My movement. I chose this. I chose this. I chose this.

I wanted this.

The voices all meld together again, creating an even louder cacophony.

Sand has reached me, wrapping over my knees, ankles, legs, and I choose to stand, to stagger away, shirt pulled over my face to create some kind of mask between the desert dirt and my lungs. Behind me, my empire of dirt has crumbled completely, and only I am left in its wake.

When the last tower crumbles, nothing left for Rahab, no red rope to save the day, the voices silence. Their howls have proved victorious. The walls are down. Nothing stands between me and the rest of the desert, the mountains and their massive caves. The cavernous openings from which creep all manner of ill-intended creatures, come to snatch me away with them.

No. They can not defeat me.

I don’t know how I know this, but I do. The voice is quieter this time, my own.

I have something they don’t know about.

And in the wake of the desolation, I reach into my jacket pocket and retrieve my last semblance of beauty— a lighter given to me by a friend. A friend who can’t make it to this place anymore.

I flick it on, and the darkness shrinks away. In all directions, I see nothing but sand. Nothing but a million ways and places to die, but I have survived here for centuries, and I will continue to do so for decades longer yet.

They can not defeat me.

Clinging to the thought, I forge deeper into the desert, flame aloft.

Gray Ashes

I'm just incredibly lonely, bouncing back and forth between wild abandon and instant depression, attempting to bridge the gap in a relatively meaningless existence. I light the world on fire and watch it burn, settling into gray ashes, the remnants of ink and paper that once meant something. 

I feel the same way, like I meant something once, like I held value long ago. Now, I feel my meaning deeper, as if in a symbolic way, just as gray ashes on the concrete hold a greater metaphor for existence than a blueprint of plans for perfecting the world around me. 

That's all I used to be, is a pitiful excuse for a sheltered teenager, completely unaware of the privilege and opportunity I'd been born into, stuck with the belief that my life was far worse than that of others, simply because it's unusual or strange. I'd been stranded into the idea that I could tell no one, say nothing, speak not a word, and the exclusivity dramatized the experiences, emphasizing them out of proportion in my mind. 

Yet now, I have begun to speak it to the world around me, watching it land. I have encountered friends with genuine hardships and watched them learn to live in a world devoid of opportunities. I have seen a singular text be enough to keep a person alive, seen a popsicle bring more happiness than any other object here on Earth could have. 

And yet still I am lonely, separated as I am from the people around me. I've built up these characters, these voices in my head to play with me and talk with me, but only now that I have truly loved humanity do I realize how shallow the voices of my imaginary friends have been. I've cast out the rest of the world, inviting everyone to be my friend but only trusting myself with one, maybe two or three people. 

Yet everyone I know is busy, or far too overwhelmed to deal with my first-world problems, though of course they'll never tell me that. 

But I'm sick and tired of plastering on my eccedentesiasm! I just want to laugh with someone who understands me, someone who has the same sense of humor, someone just as clingy as I, someone who wants to spend every waking minute with someone just because they love them, and for no other real or genuine reason. 

Nothing reminds me of the importance of true friends until they aren't there anymore. Nothing clarifies to me my lack of true friends like when I don't notice when they're gone. 

So yes, now I'm just banging my head on desks, trying to make it one more, two more, three more days, holding out and bottling up all these inexpressible feelings I miss out in the missing of companionship. 

It's odd. I never realize how reliant I am on friendships until I am devoid of them, and then I'll do anything to get them back. 

But missing one person reminds me of how much I miss everyone, and then I just spiral into a half-hearted scrolling through my phone, laughing at every picture, crying over every video and playing them again and again and again and again and again and--

I'm just so tired of the status quo, wanting to fast forward time but unable to make it even two minutes without checking my phone to see if anyone has sent me a message... still no one. I'm caught up. Completely caught up on every email, every text, every messaging app and have been for weeks. 

I am unused to loneliness, and I handle it poorly.

All around her, darkness. 

It threatened to consume her, pull her down into its depths and crush her under its weight. Drown her in its suffocation. Overcome her in every possible way, filling every crevice she allowed it. 

Then for a moment, twinkles of light in the distance. But they died. They always died. 

The darkness grew greater around her, and she began to retreat, curling into a ball. At times, she thought herself the light, for how else would she know the darkness existed? At other times, she felt so overcome by nothingness, she felt certain she was a part of it, floating among the hundreds of other atoms squashed into it with her. 

If she was a light, it grew dimmer as she lost hope. She stopped scanning the darkness, unwilling to look for other pinpricks of light if they would only fade away. 

Her light grew dimmer, until one day her hope had dwindled to an almost non-existent state. "I'm one with the darkness," she repeated. The more times she said it, the more she believed it and the less overwhelming the darkness felt. 

Yet a part of her fought back. And when this part had dwindled into near nothingness, she rallied it together one more time. For the last time, she decided to look for light. Summoning her remaining strength, she turned her gaze outward, looking past the darkness, looking to the pinpricks of light in the distance. And as she focused on them, one grew brighter than the others. 

Blinking, she found herself next to it, overcome by its brilliance. Standing in its presence, she could see clearly how the darkness shrank from it, how its rays could be seen echoed far beyond its initial presence.