A kept animal, waves of mutilation wash cold over sore ankles; a skirt is simply not meant to be worn so many empty hours.
The dichotomy is all the more evident, locked in the basement of the house that my soul suffocated in, they've moved buildings and reupholstered old scars, but the air is still slow death of feeling.
My father, excited at my deliberate, meticulous changing shape, brighter skin from brighter vegetables, longer breath from rollerblade marathons.
The moment he realized that I walk with my own pride, and that his endless ribbing hadn't phazed holes into me (yet), the excuses came pouring from his lips like maggot lemmings escaping the dire curse of having to live within his rancid gullet.
"Oh, but that sort of thing is harder for you... Health just doesn't run in our family, just like music..."
He nearly drove his already weaving car into the neighbour's fall-fashion garden gnomes when I told him to shove it in his decaying face like the last three loaves of stale pale bread and rancid sweets.
Fuck you for telling me all the things that I could never do.
I ran away and I did them.
I ran away when I moved out on you, when you told me I could never master mathematics.
I ran away again, this time across the world, my advanced crypthography book tucked under one arm, and while you sit and fester in your deaf corner, your heart gradually filling with a thousand layers of careless fat, your narrow hallway utterly bereft of music from that farther room...
...I have seen the worlds beyond your beady fish-eyes and I am slowly conquering every square centimeter, and kissing rosy cheeked loved ones with every step.
And yet, all this mastery in my mere quarter-century, and I find myself back where I began, sitting in their basement;
shivering.
Shivering, and trying to keep down the bile because for reasons that slip silkily from my memory, I agreed to return here.
And now I understand a little more about the ghosts that have me running from this continent.