Copacetic

What you could tell from your first glimpse of Emily was that she was the shameful owner of too many freckles and a telltale blush. Every time she opens her mouth she feels her skeletons lifting their burdensome weight from her gnawing stomach, full of acid and not much else. You think that must be why she covers her smile so quickly.

You feel you must’ve seen her before, but ashy, keeling beneath what smoky gloom reveals itself from resounding flame. You witness her musing on the encumbrance of blood on her hands. It’s not her’s and not anybody else's either. You wonder where it came from but not to such a degree that you could ask.

When her gaze catches yours, she ghosts the fingertips of both hands upon your skin- your wrists- it’s a pleading but restrained touch. It seems to beg for return at the same time it aches at the mere idea. You answer her unasked question with the release of a breath you’ve been holding much too long and her guard drops with her body.

Emily was a glimpse away from seventeen and much too small to bear the burdens creaking beneath the floorboards of her home; those burdens whose residue barricaded itself between the skeletons and the closet door, banging against her chest. There is only so much a heart can take before the blood within it blackens and taints the one who carries it.

Emily died of a heart attack, that’s what everyone’s been saying. You’re not surprised, in fact it’s quite fitting. You couldn’t really think of a cause of death that would hold more resemblance to her life, at least what you saw in those short moments between her eyes and yours.

You like to stay up late on Sundays and converse with her ghost, arriving all too dead to class on Mondays. She’s more alive to you now than she’s ever been before, and you’re starting to believe it’s not your imagination anymore. You got so high this Friday you’re pretty sure you saw her. You’ll get higher next Friday just to touch her. You want to wipe the blood from her hands.

When 3 months fade by, your habits have become more than addiction. It’s assumed that when you barricade yourself behind your door for days at a time that you have been consumed by demons; most everyone is confused as to how someone you barely knew could tear at you so. “Yes,” they say, “We can still feel that something’s missing, but her name doesn’t rattle around our heads so much anymore.” They keep asking you to swallow their words, but they burn your throat so bad and you can’t even beg them to stop.

How can you make up for never knowing her? By devoting every spare moment of time to the fog she’s left sitting on your bedside table or the whispers she spoke to the ceiling, I’m sure. Please stop crying, she’s still somewhere around here if you can convince yourself. If you’d take her skull and smash it against the wall maybe you’d find why she never wanted to know you before. If you keep committing pseudo-suicide on the days between Sunday and Saturday then maybe she’ll start seeing you in the shadows too.

You keep on carving letters to Emily in your thigh. You carve out replies on your wrist. You can’t read them anymore because they’re all written in chicken scratch on top of each other, but you believe as you always have that it’s the thought that counts. It's made nightmares out of the past view doctor's visits: psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists alike. They’ve expressed concern for what has been reduced to 94 pounds of you, but you like being near to Emily’s weight if you can’t be near to her heart. They call it Anorexia; you call it friend.

You wish you could’ve lived somewhere that Emily hadn’t existed, and maybe she wouldn’t plague you like rats that crawl inside your bowels. Maybe she’d stop making old friends of her fingernails and your wounds that are already pouring rancid red at the seams; she’d stop wailing in your ears. It’s hard to say these days whether you’re missing her or hating her and calling it something between the two wouldn’t be quite enough.

Tonight you pause in between coughs of blood to pour yourself a glass of your mother’s tequila and let it pool in your stomach and decompose your fragile organs; let it howl at your liver and rage at your brain. It stings and struggles as it goes down, but it’s warmer than Emily’s smile had ever been, not that one had ever been directed at you. In an hour you’re throwing up blood and tequila all over the side of your mother’s car, collapsing before you could even start the car and drive it off a cliff.

You’ve been so unkind to your body that it’s hard to make amends when everyone’s pushing plates of calories in front of you. Just like Emily you understand that if you want to mean something to this world you have to work for it. This vanity is clouding you and jabbing itś claws inside your ears and extracting your teeth from your gums. You feel faint, but it feels right. You want to thank Emily for sparking this lucidity within you.

You fail, you give in, your eyes widen as you stop yourself between a forkful of massacred maggots and you banish the contents of your stomach down a long clogged drain. Your insides pool at the bottom of today’s failures and your fingers are marred by the teeth that you still have left. You ask Emily if you will still be able to fit them around your thighs and she won’t meet your eyes. You curse her name and you can’t understand why she’s abandoned you again.

Dust settles in your brain and the riptides clatter at your eardrums; it’s all ringing a little too loud right now. Don’t allow yourself to associate with numbers exceeding 100. Cleanse yourself of steady breathing, peaceful nights, and embrace a ghost. Her name is Emily still, sitting on your bedside, too real to be here. She says she might change her name to Ana though, just for you. You think, “how kind.”

Imagine submersing yourself into acid and letting it corrode for two or three days. After that weave a crown of razor blades and declare yourself royalty. There is not much to delegate in this burnt down world of your’s but someone will rejoice you and the scars you wear like some hysterical surgeon’s anatomy lesson. Introduce yourself to a battle field and let the soldiers open fire; these bullets will fill your gaps and allow you to feel whole again.

Brain damage, they say and you feel it. How much do you weigh? Not enough, you don’t know, too much. Your skin’s coming off but it refuses to take your layers of fat for company. In the brutal air that makes a victim of your lungs you sense a shifting of  fate. With a blink it becomes a struggle to consume these whispers of wind. But you’re still strong.  There is an urgency in your soft hearted chokes and soft spoken gasps. But you’re still strong. There is somewhere you wish to be but your skin is too cold and your eyelids too heavy to see yourself there. It is simpler to lay in a grave alongside Emily.