"I would know it in any world, any life, any form, anywhere in time and space. I would die for these lavender eyes to glitter with warmth - anytime, anywhere."
His words constrict around my heart like golden barbs. The beauty of them excruciating.
...
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There's nothing poetic about sheer hollowness, nothing sweet about echoing silence. They don't say that enough. Maybe that's why I want to scream that out to the world.
To ask everyone to stop asking people to ever shut up. Ever. No matter how annoying, how irritating, how angering.
Or maybe I just want to cover up my own silence with all the noise of the world. I want the world to scream non-sense, annoying syllables twisted together into feelings that could make my lips twitch up in perhaps the ghost of a smile. In something alive.
I cannot even dare to part my lips, afraid that I would want to make a sound, afraid that I would make a single sound and that would clatter against the deep, hollow silence within me and tell me just how real all of this is.
I won't. I can't lose that. That cocoon of pure, white silence that surrounds me, into which I can bleed out all my taints and it would never be tainted.
Anne's voice sounds like a distant echo. Everyone's does. Always. Maybe that's why I don't register so many of their orders and warnings and just acquire more and more marks on my skin. But I see them through a smokescreen. I don't even feel them.
But they know exactly what I cannot stop feeling. Exactly which actions, exactly which words, strike the deepest and make me bleed from within.
The groomer of the house, Anne, locks the leather collar around my throat. I don't feel the cold of it against my own icy skin. I barely register the steadily flickering light of the tracker on it through the smokescreen that is slowly dissipating.
I have lost track of time, but in some cruel paradoxical twist, that cocoon of mine is slowly fragmenting and dissolving away. They are all learning exactly where to hit. And I hate it.
"The perfect tame doll to auction off. What you don't realise, doll, is that silence of yours works in our favour.", Anne rubs the tips of her thumb and forefinger together, studying me from head to toe, as if searching for any sign of strength I might have left, "However, the guys do keep talking about how your silence is sometimes a turn off. You might want to make the right noises, you know. That'll only help you at the end."
I want to tell her that I don't want help to turn into some brainless dummy. Because despite the sheer emotional hollowness, I can still think just fine. Yes, I might have lost track of time, but not before I scratched tally marks on the hardwood floor with an inkless pen for three weeks and then attempted to stab Anne in the damn throat with it.
The only reason she survived it was because three men were surrounding us and it was stupid of me to lose my temper in a position like that. I was punished after that.
