Stacy's Room

Block out the past
Throw it away
Stacy is Queen
Of dirt and decay
Do it fast wipe it out
Forget the past
At long last

Stacy mourned the death of her mother, but she wasn’t ever coming back so instead of dwelling on the past, she chose to block it out. She lived in her small bedroom most of the time with the exception of some nights, first and foremost because nobody else ever went into there because nobody cared about Stacy. Her hideous paradise was all she ever thought about because of that reason. At any given time she could be found behind closed doors, shadowed in a dark corner of burying her face in deep water. In the case of her living quarters, she usually spent that time listened to her stereo or writing her own music. The sound was tinny and the radio didn't work. Stacy cared less about that than the pet crow she'd had back in the 4th grade. She hated that crow, along with its dumb broken wing.
Listening to the radio, in Stacy’s opinion was an unfortunate waste of time. A mix of pathetic try hard singers competing with an endless supply of advertisements for things that she didn’t want and tv shows that she hated. And what an awful thing this tv was. Who needs it when you can create universes of your own?

On other days she spent hours in the park perfecting her death stare.

Each evening after long hours in her room she would crawl out her window and venture of f. It was a very popular park, plagued with hoards young children, single mothers and the odd kidnapper here and there. By night the park was polluted with the outcasts and freaks of the city.
Neither Stacy’s cry for help, this being her puddles for eyes or her ragged appearance was ever acknowledged by any more than a rude grunt or if the opportunity arose, a crisp five dollar note. She would often rise and rest her shivering body against her guitar, another of her late mother Emily’s few possessions. Every time she would say exactly the same thing “I don’t know why I even bother”, and yet return the following night. She would sing more to the passing few, pick up her few possessions and leave. She never left her notebooks at home at night. She would move through mounds of crunchy red leaves, snow, or whatever the season had planned, over to her favorite bench. All that surrounded her now were motionless shadows. The high oaks, to her front and centre rose up into the sky forming the bars of Stacy’s own personal prison.

In a way it was a release because without her ‘freedom’ she wouldn’t have made it this far. In a way it was a downward spiral, and Stacy, trapped in the middle of all this, was wasting away. She hadn’t always been this way. Back in the time when Emily was still alive and working two minimum wage jobs to survive she had been… well, normal. “The sort of child all parents pray for,” Emily often remarked. There was that tragic incident when she had set the cat on fire. But Emily blocked it out. “Kids do these things” she told herself.

Stacy had no friends. Stacy wanted no friends. ‘They’, this being the people she regrettably shared a classroom with by day called her a freak because she hated them, and she hated them because they called her a freak. Stacy knew exactly what they thought of her, but she blocked it out. None of this had ever happened when Emily was alive. She'd split her life in two. Before the crash, and after the crash. If somebody had told Stacy about the accident the obviously she would've caught the next train, but perhaps not. Thinking about stuff like that was too painful. Stacy blocked it out.
She lived in an old duplex directly across town from a popular intersection, two blocks away from the nearest park. Once, in the second half of her life, the dark half, she'd almost been hit while crossing it. Whether this had been accidental or something more is easily divided. She'd seen the red light and still crossed, revealing her dark intentions at long last. Her near death experience had uncovered buried memories of the accident. The one that Emily had been savagely burnt to death in, in front of her very eyes of course. The screaming, the pain, the blood was one thing but the shrill cries of death where an extremity of their own. Quite the spectacle if you get a kick out of those sort of things.
The last thing she'd ever said to Emily before the crash had been “I HATE YOU”. Obviously, Stacy had been a very different person back then, and sadly a very superficial one at that. So, to wrap it all up Stacy had told her, several short minutes before the brutal train crash, that she hated her because she said no to that pair of designer jeans Stacy wanted so badly and only because they were too expensive!

You wouldn’t guess to look at her. The fact is that Stacy had a tragic vibe about her. Maybe it was her sad expressionless poetry that she wrote by day and sang by night, crying on the inside. Shrill enough to scare even the fattest pigeons away but not to attract friends. “I am me.” She would say to herself everyday in front of her tiny mirror. A very comforting thought indeed. But a strangely familiar reflection would always look straight back at her as if to say, “Are you sure?”
Just about the only thing clean in her room were her notebooks. It was a junked up hole; filled entirely with things you 'would' dream of seeing. Normal, to the narrow minded nobody. But to Stacy it was a sacred cave, her palace of trash, hers.

At Stacy’s house there usually lived two or three others. Her Uncle Michael, and his various children on the weekends. Michael had taken Stacy in after the accident. Back then they had been best friends but times change and so do the intentions behind those things that people do. These days he treated her like she didn't exist. There was no sudden change but eventually he couldn’t bear to look at her. So much sadness in those dark expressions, so much misery in her face, her eyes were like puddles of rage and oh how they reminded him of ‘her’. On the odd occasion, very rarely though, he was very friendly to her, and occasionally he was ‘too’ friendly. You are the spitting image of your mother my princess, he often wanted to say. But all that came out was “Sometimes I wish it was you not her who died in that accident.”

The frozen Autumn breeze gushed against her exposed fair skin blew her ragged blue locks, matted with broken twigs and dead beetles onto her expressionless face. Stacy often brushed her frail hand across the smooth bench once she reached it. Still warm, as always, she would think, yet there was no sign of another person, as always. This was her routine.
Her hands were cracked and dirty, coated by masses of junk jewellery and henna tattoos. Left, right and circling up her anorexic looking arms were scattered crucifixes, little blue stars and a fuzzy pink panda, with thick crimson blood dripping off its ‘cute’ yellow fangs. The word ‘Beautiful’ was written with magic marker down her right index finger. Her outfit too was a sight to be reckoned with. She was a thrift shop junkie. Her boots extended up to her grubby knees (covered usually) and were black in colour covered in buckles and stains where mud and the odd trace of gum had rubbed off. Stacy’s bright green dress was extremely short, even for her short height, but her tattered designer jeans, worn out from so many adventures in the night excused it. Stacy had purchased them not long after the accident, with the money Emily was saving for Stacy to go to college.

Under Stacy's bed four poster bed she kept a box of treasures. These of course were her notebooks, filled with her thoughts, drawings and songs. She was a poet, and it was just natural for her lyrics to fall into place. Why they were so magical didn’t matter. They were hers, to say the least. One afternoon Stacy had come home from school to find Michael sitting on her bed with the open box on his lap. Her poetry was sprawled out across the floor. The lock had been busted open with a hammer and the tiny mirror stuck in the centre of the lid had been smashed into a pile of tiny shards, each still reflecting the anguish in her puppy dog eyes. She was clearly devastated but he still looked up at her with a cheesy grin on his face and remarked “Sometimes I wish it was you who died in that accident,” and left. He always treated her special when he made eye contact, too special.

Stacy only ever wrote one other poem.

Not many people noticed the day Stacy wasn't at school, or that her bench in the park went cold without her. Nobody bothered to call. They went on with their lives unaware that Stacy had been discovered that very morning on the floor of her bedroom, dead. A razor blade grasped in one hand, a sheet of paper in the next. It was a single poem entitled, Stacy’s Room.

Stacy’s Room

The subtle line
Between scars not being true
It’s an imaginary world
And who could've knew

She did love too
And who could've knew
When the soul was verging darkness
And the sparks of reality were few

In the absence of love
Clarity and extreme light
And who could've knew
It would end all tonight

Run because it's over
Before you find you
And who could've knew
Her days were so few.