Seventeen

𝖝𝖛. if you knew

She wished to relearn coming home.

                It was the seventeenth day. The silhouettes have peeked out of the evening sun on the day before, the monsters have come out of their hiding. The shadows have come back. They withered her wounds, tainted her soft rose into a pale November. The darkness circled her like headlights. She only had eighteen hours left. This is when she decided that to feel anything deranges you, it was hollow and silent, but in the corners of her emptiness, there was remnants of love, of light, of her.

                  The moon bled in her mouth and she had no clue. Solaris felt like a bare bullet-casing, the wake of something lethal. You learn true beauty at the end of a knife. Solaris and her dead hope grew tired, she sat and waited for Hermione to get back with a plan, the frame of the painting, the love that only brewed for her— but she knew that the eighteen hours would turn to seventeen minutes. To live and breathe was the deepest daydream she'd ever been in, a maladaptive curse: but for once, she felt steady. Okay. Ready. Her pulse was as slow as a curtain's flow on a windless day. Her veins, aortas, flesh— they all seemed like a mask, a blanket of cluelessness— her skin paled, her skin thinned, her eyes veiled, her soul sinned. She was done for, and she was fine.

She once told Hermione to never be swallowed, while she was sat on the pit of the belly her biggest beast had put her in. But she loved the darkness almost as much as she loved the monster.

People had tried finding her hospital room heart even after she had warned them it was nothing but splintered daggers— they didn't hear her because they didn't listen— so they gash themselves on her sharp tongue, on her wounded mind, on her rived chest cavities. They still refuse to hear her and they choose to make crimson paintings on each rib, colour her red, colour her scarlet, colour her anything but empty. Then, they would wake up with lesions and blame her. It's a cycle of warning, ignoring and hurting. Be a light sleeper, wake up quicker, ignore the weight of your slumber and leave before you get left. Put a bandage on their night stand, turn their lamp off, press your lips to their forehead and run. Leave. You were never worth scarring for, Solaris. Leave. Leave. Leave.

But it never did work. They realised it on their own. They left before she even got the chance to try and go.

She had compared it to giving someone with trembling fingers a loaded gun, putting her chest against the muzzle and pulling the trigger on her own. The sand was slipping through the curves and creases of the hourglass, sixteen hours left and she still couldn't find Jesus in these hollow halls. She called out to Mother Mary, the metaphor for purity, her crowds of seraphim, all bright virgins cleansed of sins. She tried to pray, find the salvation, live with Hermione—the taste of metal lived behind the teeth, her gums were bleeding with the residue of what could have been, what could still be if Hermione had made it back in time— but she knew what she had to do. And she knew she had to do it now.

                     "Heaven, help me." No one is home, Solaris. Even heaven couldn't help her.

                      Two, four, six, eight, ten— they rest on the palm of her hand, she looked at their photo resting on Hermione's nightstand: Solaris had stretched her cardigan long enough to make Hermione fit in it beside her, she was smoking a cigarette, there was a grin on her face that no one ever saw on her. Hermione's hair was tied, her hair sweeping over her forehead down to her cheeks and Solaris was looking down on her lap. Ginny had taken the photo on Hermione's (muggle) film camera when she went to Hermione's dormitory— she swallowed the pills. She took the glass by the canvas and drank it. It was pine-like, a tang on the tip of her tongue then a flash of sweet honey, then a bitter after taste circled on her mouth. It wasn't water. She didn't care. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty— the moonlight poured over her skin, its light slit open the scars on her flesh and pecked them with its stardust. Once she's gone, she will be one with the moon. The dusk was breaking her bones and her cartilage like twigs, her mind spun like a carousel and she was the only one on it. She was always one for rides. Twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-eight, thirty— she drank more of the clear liquid, everything was spinning. She sat on Hermione's bed but forced herself up: Hermione doesn't need the memory of her dying on her bed. She crawled her way to the bathroom with the pills, the resin, and her last cigarette. The blood is drained from her cheeks, her hands reached for the sink and sat on the tiled floor, lit her cigarette and grinned. As if she had all the time in the world.