That scares the ever-loving hell out of me. She’s always been gorgeous, but fucking hell, the woman she’s become is so stunning, so fiercely potent and bewitching there isn’t a man on the planet who could resist her. I stand on the front lawn long after Conor rides away, arrested by the lingering echo of her beauty, her strength, and her pain. Let her rot in post mortem.įeeling lighter, calmer, I embrace the void of nothing at all and walk away. I abandon her there on the side of the road.

I leave the girl who loved a boy with her whole heart. I leave the bruises, the soggy flesh, and the puddle of susceptible emotions. It falls off like tattered clothes and litters the ground. I become that hardened center and shed the tender, tear-soaked wrapper. I cry until all that remains is a loveless, empty, unfeeling core of nothingness. The night in the ravine, the abuse in Chicago, the pain in Jake’s room-I let it all out, sobbing, trembling, screaming until my throat shreds, until a mess of snot and sweat covers my skin, until I’m utterly depleted. Every hurt, weakness, and break inside me drains from the darkest depths of my being. But I am a person, and the pain that consumes me is more than I can withstand.Įverything rises to the surface. I think about it, crying as I try to sing it, warbling the words I remember, scraping every note from the corroded, dried-up bottom of my soul, and hating myself more. Lying in the dirt on my side, I tuck my knees to my mouth and yearn for all the things I’m not. I want to embody every part of her he wants. I want to be her breath and fill his lungs. I want to wear her skin and feel his touch. Being remembered as the girl who killed herself because she loved a boy. Wouldn’t that be symbolic? A tragedy that began and ended on a birthday with a passionately knotted rope.

I could hang myself, all alone, swinging by a rope around my neck. Killing the engine, I slide off the bike and curl up on the ground, where things get abandoned, where trash is tossed, forgotten, and never collected. I’m completely carved out.Ī few miles from the ranch, the vicious shaking in my body grows so unmanageable I pull off on a dirt path and park in a grove of trees. Now I have no one, nothing, and nowhere to go.

When I left Dad face down on the couch, more pieces of me tore loose. When I was separated from the ranch, I became half a person. When Lorne was hauled away, I lost a vital part of myself. All the ugly inside me crawls from my throat and hits the air in a wreckage of sound. Tremors shake my fingers against the handlebars.

Pam godwin knotted