moving on 

•∞• 

She didn't understand why she was breaking the promise she'd made to herself so many years ago; why her feet remained standing on the spoils of her childhood without any indication of moving. She couldn't give herself the excuses she'd been force-fed her entire life to justify it, either. 

This was where my life ended, she thought bitterly, haunted by ghosts that never decided to leave the veil of her shadows. Yet she can't seem to stop reliving the remnants embedded into the very foundation of the floor, hidden in the creaks of the walls, sitting like the elephant under this roof.

The elephant which seemed to be sitting on her shaking chest. 

There was nothing more dehumanizing than realizing her emotions, so fragilely separating her from the object of brick rubble at the floor and herself, were fading into a numbness she couldn't hold. She'd fingered fury so tightly these past years, coupled it with swirling disappointment so sharp that she wanted to etch it into the marble walls, but it seemed to have slipped through the spaces of her palms. 

Even the shouts she'd initially felt like filling the void where she stood seemed to bleed into the emptiness instead. 

She stared at the threshold. 

Where was the the glare she'd perfected these past years? What were these tracks coating the mask she'd tattooed? Years of personality she'd fought and nailed into her skin seemed to unravel with her nerve. 

You are not broken, she reproached to herself. This place is broken, shambles, but you are still intact. 

(Barely, whispered the stitches at the base of her spine). 

Her feet did not move the extra inch into the floorboards, renovated and covering the horrors creaking under the wood, but her thoughts streamed like the TV screen in the doctor's office she visited every other week.

Every other week, she said to herself triumphantly. Not every day. Not every second. 

(How can that seem like such an accomplishment when I can't even take another step?  her head taunted, sounding like the man who turned her glorious days into the ruins of what once was).

"One." Her voice rung, echoing. Echoing, because the house was empty.

"Two." Her pink Nikes slipped over the welcoming mat silently. 

"Three... Four... Five..." and maybe her voice was ragged and hoarse, as if to embody the spirit of the house in her faint words, but she was in and she was moving out of the cage that had been hinted at every time she saw those locked doors.  

"Fifteen... Sixteen... Seventeen..." and was that her room, once upon an awful tale? Was this where the cops found her bleeding on a floor meant for ring-a-rung-a-rosie's and dancing? She could see the carpet she run deep into the floor with her pacing at night. Was this where she once slept, as if every night she didn't live in fear of the monster that would come in the middle of the night to ruin her sheets...?

"Twenty... Twenty-One... Twenty-Two..." and was her voice a pitch too high? Like the times she would run away and the police would bring her back because he was so perfect at playing a human in disguise that the heroes were so fooled they doubted her bruises and bleeding palms until one day they were forced to remove their rose tinted glasses? 

"Twenty-three... Twenty-Four... Twenty-Five..." and was that how many seconds it took for her to lose the air in her lungs? To have the black spots erase her entire vision, to have him hold ugly fingers across her neck like a mark of his defiling would forever stain the last memories of her time? 

"Twenty-Six..." and here she is, finding the place she had almost died at the hands of a devil, finding the place she saw hell break through the crest of earth and find itself in her--this house's living room, with walls that saw blood splatter and innocent cries. 

"One... Two... Three..." her voice wobbled and it hurt to breathe, but she wasn't breaking, wasn't collapsing and seeing his face anymore when she closed her eyes, and maybe she will never stop being a fractured angel that never had time to see enough of the world's good to believe in heaven, but she was not breaking.

"Seven... Eight... Nine..." she said as she retraced her steps and walked out of the house that was no home to her. She counted until she had her feet planted firmly into the dirt she had one day thought she'd be lying under by age fifteen, and now she looks to the skies and laughs. 

Because she was moving, and every step meant she was moving on. 

(The memories of her wounds finally seemed to fade). 

•∞•