S/HE

By Michelle c. morris

 

After five years you had drilled holes in my brain with your imaginary finger tips. You had hollowed me out so that I was empty for those who really mattered. For five years your pale grey eyes pierced my dreams. For five years your skin and bone body curled around my brain and suffocated me. And so, I decided to undertake the process to purge you from my being. I tore out your fingertips from the annals of my mind. I dredged through my memories to find your pale grey eyes, and burned them to cinders. I wrenched your body from around my brain. But you had grown roots into my very soul so I tore myself open too. But at least you were gone. At last I was free. I would heal. I would learn to think again, to write again, to read again, and to be, without you.

 

Or so I thought.

 

But no sooner were you gone than my wounded and bleeding soul had sought out another to fill the spaces you had left gaping. I was enveloped by another. Another even more forbidden presence. A woman. A woman like myself. But she was kinder. She was beautiful. She had the best of you in her, down to her pale grey eyes. Her presence was different, but no less invasive. She was soft and she sung and she prayed to a God I could not believe would forgive me for her. A God whom I could not escape. She swam through my mind with her songs and she filled the gaps you had left. But I was no less empty for those who mattered most. I was merely haunted by another presence.

 

But I have come to realise that it was never you. It was me. It is I who wage war on myself and infest my mind with the bodies of others. It is I who hollow myself out for imagined interactions with beautiful people. It is I who turn you into monsters and cause you to infest my brain. So really, it was never you, or her. It was me. And of course, I could not tear myself from my brain.