THY ELOQUENCE

I think about ghosts a lot. Not the conjuring, biblical Hollywood crap, the quiet ones lingering in my room. Sitting at my bedside, hoping I'd take my antidepressants today and staring at myself in the mirror while I apply concealer to the eyes that haven't known peace in twelve years. Quietly watching my new clothes with tags still on, bought in the desperate hope of finally stepping out of my bed and staring at the toothbrush I haven't picked up for two days in a row. Living beneath the scars on my arms, on the days they ooze with blood, on the days they seem like distant memories. I often romanticise the morning after I kill myself, hoping, praying to wake up as one of them. To finally exist freely. To fulfil my lifelong dream of being invisible. I will probably die with an open tab of JavaScript tutorials and unsolved LeetCode problems. That's a miserable way to die. Underachiever. Failure. Just not good enough. I wish I could go back in time and be her again, th...

It’s a spring day today. It’s summer in the sun and winter in the shade. My body does not know which season to belong to, so it lingers in the in-between, splitting itself apart. Half burning, half frozen. Half alive, half rotting. You understand this, don’t you? That feeling of being suspended between two selves, two states of being, neither of them quite yours. The warmth touches you, but it does not sink in. The cold nips at your skin, but you do not shiver. You are not here, not really. You are only the shadow you cast. Just like you, The enormity of my desires disgusts me. I want to be called beautiful. I want to be told I am loved—not once, not twice, but over and over again, until the words sink through my flesh, until they take root in my bones, until I become something soft, something sacred, something worth keeping. But I am made of spoiled meat, swollen with things that should not be here. I hold too much filth inside me—blackened regrets, sickness curdling beneath my ribs, ...

  Nineteen. A cracked mirror reflecting a stranger in this sterile shoebox they called a dorm.  The air hung heavy, thick with the stench of yesterday's failures. "Not her," I clawed at the silence, but the echoes skittered off hollow walls, mocking my defiance. Memories flickered like a gruesome home movie - a child hacking at bangs in a desperate attempt at self-exorcism, hair christening the unforgiving tile in tear-soaked baptisms of solitude. My own Roman Empire in ruins, the weight of expectation a suffocating crown. Evil? A question first, then a truth so heavy it pressed the oxygen from my lungs.Loving him was a twisted prayer whispered into the neon hum of the night. A plea that he wouldn't see the monstrous hunger gnawing at my insides. Did his touch ever reach the real me, or was I just a ghost haunting his narrative? Red bled to a dusty auburn, a faded memory on a forgotten canvas. Nineteen, three hundred and sixty-two days, the supposed expiration date. S...

The face I see in the mirror of the woman looking at me feels foreign. I look at her while I dissociate. Are we the same? Do I live inside of her, or does she control me? Every waking moment, a thought creeps up: Is she sane? Am I ruining her life? What if I merge with her? Is that even possible? We look the same, yet we have no sense of familiarity. I fail to recognise her on most days. The picture she took a week ago seems so different; is that her real smile? Does her nose crinkle up? The ghost of me walks through the hallways of the college, smiling at people, sometimes strangers.  I have lost all control over her. We are two different beings now. The third one who recognises her shows up some days, but we don't let her stay. She dared to call me a monster while all I did was protect her. She knows she doesn't deserve love. We know it's never going to come our way. Her trying to look pretty only gets her looked at, stared at, and objectified. But we know that's the ...