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TRIGGER WARNING: contains mentions of self-harm and overall self-destructive madness, the loss of a child, death, and body horror
Horrific things.
I still see you wherever I look - wide-eyed, saliva mixed with blood dripping from your mouth. An older you that had never been, a grown-up you that never will be. Your arms are too long, legs too bent, so unnatural.
Horrendous.
It starts up like tinnitus in my ears. High-pitched, ringing, deafening me if just for a moment. You’d take care of me, cradling me as I put my fingertips against tragi, yet I’d hear it. You’d be there, comforting me but screaming all the same. Healing and hindering the pain borne from you.
Haunting, echoing, awful. I choke up just thinking about it, remembering it all.
In dreams, we were never separate. Your limbs fused with mine, creating a many-armed monster with a demure smile in mirrors; I wonder, if there hadn’t been an imbalance, if you would’ve been born, if you hadn’t been so fucked-up.
Yet, you remain in what you couldn’t ever be: masses inside, teeth and hair, parasitic creepings-in that are so very unwilling to leave. You claw at my skin when others aren’t looking, trying to rend open what isn’t yours - you try and take it all, all which was borne so rightfully mine because I survived and you didn’t and it wasn’t your fault it all went wrong but I was stronger so I’m here and you’re not. You tear at me because that’s all you can do, grow and depend on me. You were given nothing else.
But you’re winning, I just know it - you’re growing where you shouldn’t. Cysts underneath my skin, within my lungs and stomach and intestine, growing and blocking and ruining. All hair, shards of bone, deformed, wrong, yours and not-mine and broken. Growing in my head, where you’ll kill me and old age or suicide or a drunk driver won’t.
I remember Mom crying on my - not yours - birthday. Maybe it would’ve been yours if you hadn’t been such a pussy. But it was me in my lavender little party hat, a balloon, the classic birthday-child all dressed up, and I could only watch Mom sob because YOU should’ve been there. Dad tried to calm her in his ‘fancy’ bowtie that he’d worn on my request; he’d looked at me with his mouth half-open and eyes wide in worry, fingertips pale and spread as some sort of shield, but it just made her cry all the harder. Even the guests had looked confused, concerned for a woman who just couldn’t let go.
I didn’t understand. Dad and I had my little party, blowing out my candles together while Mom was off elsewhere, with where she’d buried the memory of you; she still never knew about you growing within me. Still doesn’t know, and neither will Dad - I’ll be an only child, always. You won’t take that from me. Even if Mom gets pregnant again, that’s a different child. It won’t be you. It’ll never be you.
But you - would you have had my same nose? My eyes? Freckles, painted on my face like stars? Dad’s features, or Mom’s? It’s no matter, really, for you never and will never exist if I have my way. But it’s not my fault. Not your fault, either. Things just didn’t turn out. Right?
I’ll get my surgeries. I’ll get you gone. My blood is not yours, no matter how much you want to pretend it is. If you had lived, you would’ve been my sister, but now you remain in my head, trying to hurt me because I won’t let you out.
My life is not yours to lead. Render me comatose, frothing at the mouth as often as you’d like. I’ll pop you out like a pimple or carve you out of my chest with my box cutter. Appear as much as you’d like, wail as much as you see fit. Make me spit up blood.
I’ll get you out of me, or die trying.
Julio Rainion is, unfortunately, a fan of Elden Ring. They've previously been published in Ghost Orchid Press, Speculative 66, and soon to be the inaugural issue of Stark Nights; they enjoy eating lemonade powder, naming animals stupid, mundane things, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Their favorite color is, probably, mustard yellow.
Image credit: Ahmed Adly on Unsplash