Tainted

Prologue - Vee

Everything seems louder and lonelier in the night. The thoughts in my head, the creak of the stairs, my fist-sized heart hammering in my chest... The hollow in my stomach where the butterflies have died.

Everything seems louder and lonelier in the night, and I've come to realize it's simply because of absence in what we desire.

If you close your eyes and listen to the rain dance upon the shingles of your roof, that absence will consume you.

You learn that the hard way.

No matter how many days pass by, living in a city that rarely ever shined only gave you the chance to admire the puddles that formed on the pavement of the lonesome urban streets.

I allow my lids to drop, I feel the thunder rumble in my eardrums; they rattle my bones and fill my stone heart with an echo.

And I've come to realize, that this is how you finally come to learn that it's acceptable to be absent of what you desire.

Because even the skies sulk and cry. And no matter how much the sun tries to shine through the grey, everything is still dark and lonely.

Although acceptable, being grey is something nobody ever wants to be. Stuck. All while still absent of the one thing we want most, trapped in the purgatory of in between.

I was sixteen years old when my grandfather taught me the only life lesson I'd ever received from him. He was sixty-seven at the time and drunk until he could barely walk on his two feet, but I could never forget what he had said to me the night of my grandmother's birthday party.

"What do these people know, Mama?" he'd asked me, looking around with his arms spread open, eyes glinting. "They think they know me, they think they know. But they fail to realize that to understand an individual is living. Am I wrong, Mama, you tell me?"

Those must have been the most words my grandfather had ever said to me without breaking eye contact. While my cousins giggled at his little speech, I continued to listen.

As my grandfather had always been a quiet man, I made the effort in taking him seriously the one time he spoke to me more than the casual routined questions.

He had never been much of an elaborator, nor the man with the right answers, but that night he had every answer and an opinion to go along with it.

"At night, I lay in bed, put my head down to sleep, just to put the pillow over my head so I don't have to hear them," he said, shaking his head in disgust. "Is that right? Is it right that these people think they know everything, but cannot even understand me? Who can they understand, then? Who will understand them?"

I distinctly remember only being able to nod my head, the amusement I'd found in his intoxication no longer amusement, but sorrow.

It was strange, how my grandfather was able to sum up my entire life into his words. I realized then, just like my grandfather, I was never one to be understood.

And the question remained: was it fair?

The one thing I'd only ever wanted in life was to be understood. To have someone that looked at me with a small smile and a nod whenever I said something or did something because I wanted to. I yearned so long for a person that was able to rationalize my every decision, desire and hope. Someone that took the time to understand me for who I was.

As always, it was just too much to ask. And now I sat hopeless, with an idle mind that was the devil's workshop and the demon known as my conscience eating away at my heart.

And what did my conscience say now?

It said, that although I grew agitated with the constant downpour of the city's aggravating rain, here I sat, in my misery, watching the sun finally begin to seep out of the clouds of dawn... And I suddenly missed the rain.

He had always been my rain.

He knew me like I was his thunder and lightning. He absorbed himself into my skin, trickled down my fragile flesh and over my goose bumps.

He knew me. He understood me.

And perhaps he was the one thing that had been right all along.