Detritus

NOTE: Sensitive content. Sexual violence, physical violence, gore, or abuse, mental health

It begins as a whisper. The familiar tingling along the length of your spring, rattling up past your shoulders to coalesce in the basin of your skull as an unearthly rattle. The sensation, they say, is at once ethereal and unreal. 

I feel nothing. Where they sense the world and become, I am lost and unsure. The uncertain and unfamiliar tone they say should call to me has never once reached out, has never once found its home in my mind. 

The sound is what awakes me at first. A gentle chittering, almost a conversational whisper, floats into my left ear and I crack my right eye to break my stupor. A small mouse sits just below my earlobe, a small ball of plastic in its clawed hands. It robotically raises the plastic to its pointed mouth and, in quick, sharp motions, tears off pieces. 

I shift my leg to catch a better view but I’ve already done too much. Its beady eyes catch mine and I see the fear that lies there before it leaps from its perch and scampers away, to find a better home with the detritus of the stage. It leaves me alone. 

I trace my thoughts before daring to move again. The roar, I repeat to myself, the rage, the reign. The whore, the mage, the pain. 

I mustn’t forget. I mustn’t forget, I remember. 

And with a shudder I shift my leg beneath my body and roll from my snail’s perch to peer over the ledge. My chin catches a small divot in the pebbled concrete and I feel my mind throb with pain. For a moment, darkness creeps in on the edges of my vision. 

I fight the urge to drift off again and pull myself up with one arm to lean against the railing. From this vantage the stadium is more desolate than I could have imagined. The walls, lined with rows and rows of lonely seats, feel enclosed, capturing your gaze and throwing it back towards you. Weaponized emotion, the danger of finding yourself in a slab of concrete. 

Cups and confetti scraps lie in wait below the chairs, and from my distance I can feel the subtle disruptions of small bodies scampering across the pathways. I wonder if they spend their lives searching for safety, too. 

A sudden cleaving of the world in two forces me onto my knees and I spin back to the tottering speakers. My ears explode in pain and I collapse, a shuddering mess, to the ground, a chorus of voices screaming in my ears, a warning, they love me, so they say, they tell me they love me, and that this will do me good.

His eyes are what I remember, the electric green of some alien kindness I felt on first sight. We brush shoulders in a packed common room of the squat gray housing complex reserved for art majors and freshmen, the hubbub of adrenaline-seeking drug-driven teenagers a beautiful symphony of my first night home. A new home, they called it. A different life. What a strange way to name it. How odd, I find them, the little insects that collected at the bottom of my windowsill. How can you manage to go on living when those you love are dead and gone? But they had no more answers for me than the dark-suited men who knocked on my door that day. No more names for it than a tragic accident. 

No note is played on accident, no melody unintentional. Just as my violin is not a strong-willed player my mother was not a clumsy madam, who happened upon a chef’s blade and faced fate the wrong way. 

So in this warm, pulsating crowd I don’t believe he is an accident. And all he does the rest of that night is prove me right. 

“A drink?” he asks.

The first generous act I have felt in some time. He offers the cup to me and I down it in one go. And those electric green eyes sparkle wonderfully. 

He says something more but I don’t hear it. I can’t hear it. All that chimes are the gentle synth of church organs. A wedding? This soon? She would think so little of me, here, now. But I love this man, this fool, this young hot cruelly kind savior of mine. He has found me in a crowd, and he could let the world burn for all I care. He is mine, I am sure of it, and I’m sure he knows, too.

Seven months of frenzied company, the music box romance my friends will mock me for. Because all they can do is mock. 

Seven months of this man, this boy in my life. When he rests his head on my chest and looks up to gaze through me I flail and catch my breath. The green eyes throw me off guard, always. I don’t fully hear the question before he finishes. 

A concert, I dizzily hear myself agree. A concert. I’d love that. 

He pulls me into the dim corner and the music fades away. The electricity in the air is still palpable, but here, under the pale yellow night light, it is less than a threat. It is love, in purest true form. 

He chuckles and looks back at me. And my throat goes dry.

And he offers me the drink. 

And I take it.

Electricity in the air. Static electricity. All I can see are waves in those deep green irises, a murky ocean current disturbed by footprints in the sand. Could I drown, I have wondered, in that green? Would I drown?

I choke back the nausea that fights at my throat, the hands clamoring to punch past my lips and deep through me, to rip off what defenses I have and leave me bare and plain, my life and lies strewn for the world to see. 

Who am I on this stage? I feel bloody, bruised. The music has reached its crescendo, the speakers hundreds of feet away now grown quiet, but still I hear the melody pulse through my ears. The trembling, never ending, uneven pulse, a rhythm that drives through my core. In my center. In me.

I shiver. Life is lonely, left on a stage. The detritus of a perfect concert. The waste of another song, discarded.

She returns to me. Scampering up the dark metal pole, across the fabric, up my shorn skin, to whisper in my ear once more. I’m sorry, is all I can hear. But I know the rest by heart. I’m sorry, but you’re just not good enough.

And I smile. She chokes on the plastic and curls up, finally. And the whispers stop.