Haunted

I wandered, numb and uncaring, heedless of the direction my splintered heart chose.

Caged, caught in a web of my own devising, hiding from a world that craved only to cause me pain, I strayed somewhere between the border of insanity. Some part of me was kept safe within my minds self-imposed exile, but with every second I was sliding further into the blackness that had stolen everything that was precious. With every moment my tenuous sense of self was dissolving. I was imperfect, splintered and then splintered again, the pieces so tiny that they could never all be found, could never be put back together to create the woman who had once been whole.

I was simply bare feet following an aimless path into a wilderness of confused images, all shaped together in an eclectic mess of a future now destroyed.

The shadows stretched, becoming creatures of nightmares, haunting my empty body, leaving silhouettes on unfeeling skin, flickering shapes of darkness that stopped the light as it wove a tentative path to the forest floor, shapes that chased the last glimmers of life from a landscape of frozen death.

A landscape of winter grey to mirror my wretched soul.

Loss had torn me apart, left me screaming and insensible, broken and lost, a wasteland of hidden scars. I was but the ghost of a woman, herself haunted by the formless shapes of a memory that would never fade. Haunted by a tiny imp I would never know.

I stopped my wandering, eyes staring, naked and unseeing, agony bleeding from the depths of my being for the one who had died nameless inside me. Gone. Just life's blood slick on my thighs, red to complement the death it symbolised, the one it had taken from me.

Gone. Stolen.

My cheeks wet with sorrow, I ran. Shadows my only company, following and never ceasing, changing and twisting till they were reflections of my very essence, reflections of the instant that had left me torn asunder, broken and alone. Left me nothing, but easy prey to the hell that hunted my sleepless hours. I had lost everything. I was ripped apart and bleeding, labelled defective and deficient.

One moment and I was no more, one moment that the world never even noticed.

My dreams were in tatters, leaving me plagued by images terrible in their clarity. I ran faster, my lungs screaming as trees clawed and scratched at my face in my desperate attempt to leave behind everything, everything that no longer mattered. Feeling like Snow White but knowing my ending could never be as fortunate. No one would wake me from my death; no one could give me release from my state of empty stillness.

A kiss could never resurrect my empty soul, could never give me back all I had lost.

I would forever mourn. Wanting, needing, loving. But it would change not a thing. The cradle would be filled with nothing but the crystal tears of a woman who wished the world would just stop. It would never embrace the one it was meant for. It would just sit there. Just like the creases around my eyes would never again crinkle in real happiness, my voice would never again contain pleasure and light, the cradle would sit there, as still and lifeless as a headstone left nameless through the insensitivity of time.

The body that housed me was as superfluous and fragile as a butterfly's wing, transparent and useless without the pith that gave them purpose. Irrevocably gone and irreplaceable. They had no choice but to die.

My life stretched ahead of me, a barren dessert of inhospitable sand, devoid of life, lacking even a gentle breeze to sway the few untended weeds in even an imitation of a lived existence. Instead there was rock wearing away till it was sand. Hard and unforgiving until it was eroded to be so tiny as to be passionless and fickle. Nothing could bring them to life. A field of sorrow left for winter to claim in her cold passionless biting grip, never intended for the birth that spring might inspire.

Just a landscape of angry sand, cold and bitter as ice.

A cold that gripped me, that would never leave me, a cold that had come with a knife of twisting agony and the warm flow of a life taken to another plane. A cold that filled my lungs with every scream that escaped me, every feral howl into a night shared by shadows and flickers of everything unbearable.

Overwhelming despair threatened to consume me, drown me in her murky depths. She crept through the cracks of my hastily built walls, stole through the windows of my soul every time my eyes opened to test the world that had trapped me within a body slowly fading to nothing.

Despite myself, my eyes widened, perhaps needing to at least attempt to stop torrent of sadness drawing me below, perhaps searching to glimpse some beacon of hope however pale and inconsistent it was. But all I saw was darkness. The forest a beautiful symphony now muted, everything fading to soft echoes of a beauty now destroyed. The only song I yearned for had been lost.

Despair lapped at my toes, beckoning me, willing me to join her quiet depths.

Devoured and dying, lonely and lost. Drowning with nothing to grab on to, nothing to pull me from the wild path my dying heart followed.

And I not having the energy to care.

I will always miss you…

I'm not entirely happy with it, but thought I'd put it up anyway… if anyone has any suggestions to make it more emotive or anything, feel free to tell me!