Walk of Shame

It starts within the same room, scheduled by shadows that darken the day. A pin cushion of pain, how it needles its way along the grey corridors of mind, how it tricks her into believing it's all about time. She can do time, she’s done time. 

It's these thoughts that continue to prick at the images sewn under the surface of her scabrous skin; like a deep vein of deceit, it runs its own colour of red inside her now. Her anger builds over the slow creep to where those psychological games were played. It’s become the very space she doesn’t want to visit, knowing it heads for trouble and messes with her mind. How it pierces the same points and sinks into places of familiarity, parts known all too well. She likens it to the wires of a matrix, the metal bends of a dark force that lowers her neck into a type of hanging of the head, its depressed mould disguised as a thin sheet of grey. It gives an element of being somehow fragile and cold to touch. Looking down at her feet, she wondered when her life had reached this point of too much.

Her hands begin to shake as she cradles the pain in her head, it forces her to search within, rocking back into a moment of time. Now to locate a picture of the find, she hears the numbers on her clock ticking over in their scream of time. More names begin to flood her and she is reminded of why her face just doesn’t fit. She is struck by its depth and the overwhelming sense of grief. ‘Champagne anyone’, she could hear them say, another red carpet event she had been excluded from, always kept out of the loop, no thought to the destruction and loss of life, to them it was so clinical, she was just a bad debt.

She’d simply been the pawn in their game, one played many times before by a great cast of performers, actors who carried out their job with finesse and medical skill, the only difference this time is she had refused to be like anything else they had known or who had come before. 

That wheel of death, its endless spin each day, those same questions rolling over to leave a permanent tire tread, its mark burned into her brain, it asked her the same question every time: should she stay or just go. She was the driver they had taken for a ride in an attempt to claim her as their own. Yes, it had been a long road map out of hell, they had made sure she was ‘doctored’ well. Carved by the surgeon's knife, sculpted into pain, cased managed into a continuous push and pull, their emotional drain. To think that such a mind could be dirtied by white coats and the stain of too many feet, - she was the very substance of their abuse too, the drip feed, labelled now as a medical disease, due to no further need, they would continue to twist and turn their knives until she was only remembered as a virus needing to be contained, to stop its spread. That system of 9, for which she had cracked their code, a triage labelled help that operated under a very different mode. It had left her daughter for dead.

Use and abuse was a term she had come to realise that simply meant knowing when to apply pressure and when to take it off. Only a skilled nurse could bandage it into something believable and call it wound management, of which clearly it was not. 

At the end of another long corridor from the chaos of mind, doors are often seen to swing between two dividing worlds, they leave nothing in front or behind, no ability to lean on or step beyond and expunge the find.

Doors she now thinks about in this hallway of time, how they slam shut or swing back to hide or reveal crime.

There are so many images running rampant in her head, it has all become the trauma trash, emptied onto her, another dump of what happened, how she was left behind. Roadkill often slows everything to a saddening slump.

She sees how long these thoughts have stayed with her now. Like scenes from a bad movie of which she can't stop the rewind.

Morning light will again move the injuries into a deeper place of disguise, yet it never seems to soften the blow or shorten the shadows that lay a heavy blanket across her mind. It's a daily struggle to want to go on or even know how to be. Time can’t change any of that, it's the constant swing of another rotating door to which neither can she grip any handle to want to belong anymore. Pain does that.

There it is that same feeling that washes over, how no day should start without her for the meaning that she brought. Psychological abuse really fucks with your head! The clever cover up that creates chaos and confusion. ‘Shall we try one last time, she had also heard them say’, that clinical discussion burned into memory for the scars that remain. A death design, shaped by hand, stained its very own colour of blood. Like the bad debt she had been to them, they move on and away, tired and with no care or concern for the death game they played. They have more lives to save is what you will hear them say, as they walk their red carpet gathering stars to an Academic hall of fame. Oh how narcissistic and terribly vain.

As she ties the ribbon around the manuscript a lasting thought shoots across her mind: ‘there’s often a whole lot of pain hidden beneath such a bow, most would never begin to understand or even take the trouble to want to know’. But as she often finds herself saying: 

A book should break a barrier of sound, for that which to call your own. 

At the push of her pen, no typewriter to be found, she would simply edit out the harm and do this the old fashioned way, for her life was no movie for others to play. She would walk beyond the dirt they had found in their need to shame

 It starts in the same room, scheduled by shadows that darken her day....