#slugmother

you knew too well how to wear girls down

you’d already had too much practice

so by the time i met you

breaking me was an act you could perform effortlessly

we will be remembered, as we should

the whole of this god forsaken town already knows the story of us

people i’ve never seen before in my life still say your name when they find out mine

does it kill you knowing that they know everything?

because i cannot live with the whispers behind my back anymore

how do you like everyone knowing our secrets? our broken promises? everything we ever whispered behind closed doors when we thought no one could hear us?

did you know it would end like this?

maybe we both knew we’d go up in flames from the start

maybe we chose to ignore it

maybe we both deserve all of this

i am in love with you and i have been in love with you since i was thirteen years old. three summers have passed and the people we are now would be unrecognisable to the kids we were then but the one thing that hasn’t changed is the love i have for you. through everything, it hasn’t faded one bit.

i am in love with you. and it doesn’t matter that you don’t love me back anymore because i think that loving you saved me. when dirty hands were touching me, you’re voice was in my head telling me “no”, telling me “that boy is in love with your body and not with you, this isn’t what real love looks like”

i am in love with you and i have loved you through everything and that is okay. it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.

The happiness slips it’s way in when you’re too busy focusing on not dying

It creeps up on you at the exact moment you thought you’d lost it for good

And something inside you clicks and you don’t want to die anymore

All of a sudden, sad songs are just sad songs

And ghosts still appear every now and then but you’ve learnt that you can just blink them away

You notice things you never noticed before when you were too stuck inside your own head

Like the painting the sun makes when it’s setting but hasn’t fully disappeared yet

Or the way even when the darkness has completely taken over the stars finally get to show their beauty to the sleeping world

The happiness shines through the scars and the pain and shows you beauty you never thought you’d be capable to see

The happiness shines through and it gets better

It gets better and you don’t want to die

You don’t want to die and you’re alive

You’re alive you’re alive you’re alive

Tell me how I’m suppose to move on when you find your way into everything I do

How am I suppose to forget your face when I see your eyes every time I shut mine?

They say with time things get easier and you move on, but you’re still haunting me

Everything you did still haunts me

it was wrong

all of it

the biggest mistake of your life was more mistakes than you can count all merged into one

innocence turned to guilt in two weeks

and guilt turned to a god damn hurricane after a month

thirty days later and you can’t figure out how you could mistake all the red warnings for pretty lights

how you could see the road so clear when there were car crashes left, right and centre

you try to place the blame somewhere where it looks like it fits but you know where it truly should be

the blame belongs here

the blame always belonged here

I can remember thinking ‘this place doesn’t feel like a home.’ The lobby of the building was barren except for a sleepy security guard who didn’t even acknowledge the slam of the door as it shut behind us and I noticed that despite the space’s expansiveness, there wasn’t any furniture. No uncomfortable sofas or coffee-stained end tables typical for most lobbies belonging to apartment buildings. Not so much as a fake plant in sight. The lighting in the corridors and the strange-smelling lift was so harsh and unforgiving on the eyes that I felt like a fly lying dead in one of those Eazyzap bug traps, still twitching from the shock of the electricity. I was almost sober by the time we got up to their apartment so when I was offered a shot of vodka I accepted it like a dehydrated dog might accept water from a puddle during a walk. It singed my throat on the way down and I had to fight not to retch from the aftertaste. 

I had met these people not even two hours before at a bar; my friends already knew them but I was a neophyte, a stranger to their many charms: Casey’s overbearing presence that infuriated me even more than the sound of his voice, so smooth that I couldn’t help but be entranced by it despite every part of me screaming that it was all a lie. Matthew’s scruffy long hair and wire frame glasses that reminded me of a book character I’d fallen in love with more times than I could even count, his shit-eating grin that made you feel like you were in on some private joke of his. Fraser’s backwards ball cap (because that’s always been a weak spot of mine) and a sadness so whole within him that I could feel it from the other side of the room, a sadness so whole that I could hear it through his contagious laugh.

Their apartment was on the top floor of the block - an alien space that felt more like being stuck in a hidden pocket of time - and one side of the kitchen was all windows that offered us a panoramic view of the London skyline. The alcohol and whatever we had smoked on the way over had gone straight to my head and staring at the view felt more like staring into a giant snow globe I’d found in one of those shitty gift shops in Leicester Square. My head was spinning in a good way and everything had this undeniable realness to it, like someone had taken a pen and given everything a bold outline. Even the floor had a life of its own. I had to sit down. I perched next to Matthew. We gazed out of the window, pointed out Tower Bridge and the London Eye and he gave me a gummy worm that wasn’t just a gummy worm. It tasted like TV static and made the glands in the side of my neck tingle and just by looking at him I knew that our souls were one in the same. 

We had one of those conversations that you can only have while intoxicated, the kind where you discuss parallel universes, protagonist theory and mental illness. Fraser told me that he did cocaine because he was addicted to it. Matthew replied matter-of-factly that he did cocaine to feel like a rockstar, and that pretty much sums up humans, don’t you think? We do things to feel like something else or just anything at all. 

That’s why I was there. Because it felt like something. 

It was an awakening of the rudest sort, realising that in the end, the only person that you have is yourself. I’d been hearing this phrase all of my life but never put much stock into it until I was sitting on the kitchen tiles of my empty house in a pool of my own blood. You have family. You have friends. Until you don’t. And it’s just you.

h.w