15 January 2012
They cut you open and you fall apart obediently, split in two, a red sash down your speckled white skin. You are an animal now, not a child; a frog or a cow's eye, dead and to be dissected.
They put a new heart in your chest but leave the knives inside, so a ghost haunts your stitches and whispers when you sleep. They tell you that you're going to be okay, like a frog or a cow's eye or a broken child knows how to be okay.
You turn the holes in the ceiling into black stars, scratch your name into the constellations so they will always be scarred with your memory, just in case they pull you back open and you forget what you are.
They prop you against a pillow and you sink into it. They put books in your hands and use your fingers to turn the pages of someone else's story, pictures and words to remind you that you have no chance, that you will never have a chance.
At night the stars go dark and hushed voices erupt from the crack in the abyss, arguing about you, about money. (It feels like home.) Something sings in a low, soft, child's whisper and the noise and warmth subsides.
I love you, I love you, it says, I love you, words pouring like electricity through your healing scars and the little knives in your heart stir harder, scraping against your insides, as if to carve someone else's stars onto your flesh.
Borrowed Time • Opuss № I