But I don’t move.
I just breathe into the floor like maybe it’ll open up and swallow me whole.
I don’t know how long I lie there—minutes, hours, eternities. Grief warps time. So does guilt. And I have both wrapped around my throat like the chain I snapped in a fit of rage, the same way I used to snap rubber bands against my wrist just to feel something that made sense.
There’s a smear of blood on the wall where the necklace hit the mirror. The glass didn’t shatter like I wanted it to. It just cracked. A clean, precise fracture right down the middle.
Like me.
I laugh. Or maybe I sob. It comes out somewhere in between—raw and choked and too loud for the silence that’s wrapped around this room like insulation. He hasn’t come. I thought he would. I thought he’d storm in and punish me, rip apart what’s left just to feel it crumble in his hands.
But nothing.
And somehow, that’s worse because now I’m left with my own thoughts and they’re far crueller than he’s ever been.
I roll to my back. The ceiling is a pale grey, smooth and unblemished. The kind of sterile colour they paint asylum walls, not out of comfort—but control.
My arms are littered with tiny cuts and bruises. Marks from my own defiance, not his. But he’ll see them. He always sees. He watches like a god with blood on his hands and lust in his eyes. Watching me fall apart piece by piece, like it’s art.
And maybe it is.
Maybe I’m the performance. The tragic little fae girl unravelling in a cage she keeps insisting she can escape.
But I haven’t even tried the door.
Not in days.
There’s a part of me—a sick, broken, pathetic part—that doesn’t want to because when he comes back, when I see his shadow stretch across the threshold, when his voice curls around my name like it belongs to him… I forget how to hate him.
I forget how to breathe without waiting for him to fill my lungs.
My thighs squeeze together. Not from pain.
Fuck.
I press the heel of my palm into my eyes until stars burst behind them. Until I can’t see the reflection of what I’m becoming.
I’m not falling in love with him. It’s not that. It’s something darker. Something fouler. An infection. A rot that’s set in so deep I don’t even feel it anymore.
I want him to come back.
I want him to hurt me.
I want him to make it stop.
I close my eyes, but that doesn’t stop the visions. Doesn’t stop the way I see him in the cracks of the ceiling, in the silence between my heartbeats. He lingers in my blood now. A virus that spreads the moment I dare pretend I’m still whole.
The necklace sits where it fell—warped, tarnished, still humming with the heat of my fury. I think about picking it up. I think about throwing it harder this time, until the glass gives way and shatters like I did.
I don’t move because movement requires intention, and I don’t know what I want anymore.
Do I want to escape?
Or do I want him to catch me trying?
He’s rewired me. Remapped my wants. Traced new meaning into my pain like tattoos burnt into skin.
I can still feel his voice in my throat. Like I swallowed it.
