Body as Razor Blade

The trouble is she says too much but she can’t seem to help it. This is why when he looks at her with a mix of twisted lust and dare, she looks down at her feet and feels her insides shudder. A little hit of desire in her veins and a little bit of fear in the pit of her mouth makes her swallow the whiskey, makes her flick her long brown hair to the other side of her fragile face, so that her hands won’t reach out to touch what she is not supposed to touch.

It’s later and then it’s later still, she’s in her bed alone bundled in blankets but the shaking won’t stop when the night wind kicks up and rattles the window pane. As the first slashes of heavy rain cut across the glass, she can see the street lights blur, glowing pale yellow orbs hovering at the corner by the baseball fields where she met a man who couldn’t give her what she wanted because she couldn’t name it even if she tried, but the look in his eyes told her he might give up everything he had just for the chance to make her his own.

People can be addicts and people can be addictions. People can turn to chemicals and fuck up the signals in your brain which send messages to the heart: stop, don’t stop, open, close, sigh, kick, swallow, kneel, beg, disappear, run. But who doesn’t want that? Who doesn’t want to build it all up just to rip it all down and start over once again. Maybe nobody does and that’s what scares her most when she is alone with her darkest thoughts. Maybe she’s fractured, somehow disturbed in a way no one else could ever understand. Her insides not like a flower to penetrate, more like a hand grenade dying to explode.

In the thick dark clouds which gather high above, she sees the face of someone she used to love but who left her faded as a shadow when he died. It can be a terrible feeling to place a piece of one’s heart into the finite hands of another when no one can promise that you will both make it out alive. He used to speak about her like she was divine, like she was a whisper on a breeze skimming soft across the burning sun. Untouchable. Ethereal. Impossible.

People can be lovers and lovers can be storms. Electric, sudden, and gone faster than lightning when it strikes a dry summer field. Piercing the heart, setting it on fire, and then raining, raining, raining for ages.