Mirrored Confetti

With every passing second, I could feel the ache in my chest, my bones, stinging straight through to my heart. I'd been hurt before, but nothing compared to this.



I stood staring through blurred, watered eyes, with the remnants of my life fluttering in tiny reflection before me. In just that moment, everything had changed, and though I stood surrounded, I knew what it meant to be alone.



It started on a warm night nearly two years earlier. He'd left, gone missing, and when he returned, they spoke. Hushed whispers I barely heard with ears pressed against the bedroom door.



It was a lot of things, but mostly the blame fell to me. Twelve years hadn't been enough and was already too much, and I wasn't his and I wasn't right, and things had been too wrong for too long and there was no way to change it or take it back.



He said he needed space and time and thoughts, to think it through and get his head back to sorts,

but he couldn't do it here, certainly not with me around. And she had no voice. I wasn't his, and she agreed I wasn't right, so if he'd leave, she'd have to let him go.



And so he did.



It was different. No one around and nothing but tense silences, thick and stifling and painful. Accusing. Deftly pointing fingers, ghosting untraceable punishments, stabbing like sharpened knives and leaving invisible wounds. Wounds that scabbed. Scabs that were picked and never healed but left secret scars. Scars that faded and hid but reappeared unceasingly. Waiting, frightened and edged, to be picked again. Never disappointed.



And then you returned.



Haggard, worn out, thin and withering and guilty, and mean because of it. Hurt and played, and everyone hardened. Weary and angry, unyielding and unspeaking. Stinking with hate. Separated by silence, and begrudged. Ill-hidden disgust because I was such a freak, and not yours. Too different, too strange, too quiet, and not yours. Alien, dangerous, crazy, and always not yours.



You three, with your wife and the one you loved, fell back into routines, and I hid. In the books, in the pages, in the words and -most dangerously- in the mind. Accepted solitude and loneliness and never understanding. Rejected and fearing and crying and never hardening. Delicate and sensitive and fragile and raw and always human. Never yours and barely hers and terribly stuck and wanting, but still always human. Two more years of painfully always human.



And then we broke.



Tenuous balance shifted. One silent note too many. One gruff response too many. One striking look too many.



And then we toppled.



A simple strike. The first to leave a physical bruise, a physical sting, a physical pain. A simple strike to shatter. And a returning blow for every piece that crumbled. Incessantly, unstoppable, 'til they're falling. Bits of broken reflection too ugly to look at, too much to hide, and not your mess to clean.



Mirrored confetti of a fallen life looking up into the only face willing to see.