torn
There’s a world where everything’s barren, where the wind blows remnants of lives around like pieces of dirt. The wind is unrelenting and there’s always pieces of someone’s heart or the disarray of someone’s past getting in your hair and your eyes. The world is torn, the sky ripped open. Diary pages and unsent letters fall apart against the wind and come down in torrents, creating storms of regret no weatherman knew to predict.
She carries an umbrella and raincoat, but they’re never enough. She thinks one day she’d like to leave, if she could only find the road out, but the streets are strewn with jagged, sharp words that fall from the sky, words that should have remained unspoken yet somehow ended up here, in this world where their chaos belongs.
She never sees anyone else in this world. She knows there are other people here, she can feel their fear, she steps in their heartbreak, winds her way around their emotions. Sometimes she tries to piece together their lives, but the wind is too much, scatters the words everywhere. She can never get a grasp on what brought her or anyone else here.
If she just had a hand to hold, a voice to reassure her. Maybe then she would be able to find her way out. But she’s alone, she knows she’s been tasked with finding her own way out. What scares her most is that she’s here forever, here in this torn page of a world and that even if she found her way out, she’d be stuck trying to explain what has happened to her to people who will only tell her she imagined the whole thing. It’s all in your head, they’ll say, and she’ll nod. Yes, it is. That’s the point.
She walks on, a trudging, exhausted kind of walks that sees her hunching into the wind, head always down. She’s not really looking for a way out as much as she’s hoping to just run into one. She no longer has the strength to actively try to escape. There’s a break here somewhere, she thinks. A ray of light will come through and she’ll climb it, shimmy up to the sky, through the clouds, and come down the other side.
For now she’ll live here, in this world where everything is broken or breaking, because she no longer knows how to look for a way out.
