A letter, not addressed
May. 20th, 2024 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dornishviperxThis is a letter to a ghost.
Content warning for graphic descriptions of violence (drowning) and dead bodies, as well as mentions of war.
You always wanted to be a ghost — to fade into the background, not to be seen or heard by anyone. I figure that's where your fascination with them must have come from, because I still remember the way your face would scrunch up in discomfort whenever more than two people looked at you. Well, congratulations: you've become one. We are one month short of the anniversary of the day that I killed you, and held your limp body underneath the Charles River as it began to decompose in the cool water and the summer heat. It wasn't my fault: you begged me to. You said, I do not value life. And I said, then I must take yours. You didn't even bother to kick or scream, you knew you deserved to be held down in the dirty water for what you'd done. When I killed you, I was the only one crying.
Your body was so purple, I held it underneath the water for hours, for days. I don't know if it was tender or cruel to do it, I could've let the water run its course with you. Instead, your body bloated and swelled with rot and bile, and I held it until your skin started tearing off from the currents, until the fish scavenged everything off your bones, from your eyes to your liver. I couldn't stop holding it even though you were already dead and I'd long run out of tears. I remember the way your flesh felt on my fingertips as it came off the sharp edge of bone and viscera.
This week, I'll be walking on the grassy hills where we met, where we watched the stars while the snow melted underneath our jackets, where you came running to hold me when I asked and where I stopped you from—
I wonder how much I'll miss you when I feel the grass beneath my feet. Will I feel the same rush of the wind that I felt on my neck the day that I drowned you? Will I feel my heart beating faster, like it did whenever I was around you? Will you haunt me, then? You don't seem like the type who would haunt; you never wanted to do anything but fade. You were oblivion made woman.
Yet you do. Haunt me. Haunt the world. You are in the crying of every child who loses their home to a war plane. You are in the screaming desperation of every refugee. You are in the blood and in the ruined soil. You are in the pain. You are in the hurt. You are responsible, so you are there.
I thought I'd never be able to hate you, because I loved you even as I killed you. Now, I think I have hated you. I have been able to fashion my heart into a blade and let it twist and twist and twist in my chest until I felt bitterness flooding my mouth. I have reveled in it, I have let it wrap around my skin and my muscles and wring itself around me in a strange sort of pleasure. I have let it fill my body with heat and bring me to a climax. Yet I do not think I hate you, not as a permanent state of being. I can no longer say I love you either, even if there is a scar in my ribcage that matches the one on your face. I exist in this strange limbo of love and unlove and hate and unhate. The contradictions pull at me like the river tide ripping the flesh off a corpse. I want them to stop. I want you to stop. Like your heart and your breath did in the water, I want your awful, awful presence to leave me. I don't want eight years of memories or eight years of love. I only want to remember your corpse, swollen and ugly and mutilated — somebody who cares so little for life should never have looked as beautiful and bright as you. When I drowned you, that was me making sure the outside showed what your insides were always like.
Content warning for graphic descriptions of violence (drowning) and dead bodies, as well as mentions of war.
You always wanted to be a ghost — to fade into the background, not to be seen or heard by anyone. I figure that's where your fascination with them must have come from, because I still remember the way your face would scrunch up in discomfort whenever more than two people looked at you. Well, congratulations: you've become one. We are one month short of the anniversary of the day that I killed you, and held your limp body underneath the Charles River as it began to decompose in the cool water and the summer heat. It wasn't my fault: you begged me to. You said, I do not value life. And I said, then I must take yours. You didn't even bother to kick or scream, you knew you deserved to be held down in the dirty water for what you'd done. When I killed you, I was the only one crying.
Your body was so purple, I held it underneath the water for hours, for days. I don't know if it was tender or cruel to do it, I could've let the water run its course with you. Instead, your body bloated and swelled with rot and bile, and I held it until your skin started tearing off from the currents, until the fish scavenged everything off your bones, from your eyes to your liver. I couldn't stop holding it even though you were already dead and I'd long run out of tears. I remember the way your flesh felt on my fingertips as it came off the sharp edge of bone and viscera.
This week, I'll be walking on the grassy hills where we met, where we watched the stars while the snow melted underneath our jackets, where you came running to hold me when I asked and where I stopped you from—
I wonder how much I'll miss you when I feel the grass beneath my feet. Will I feel the same rush of the wind that I felt on my neck the day that I drowned you? Will I feel my heart beating faster, like it did whenever I was around you? Will you haunt me, then? You don't seem like the type who would haunt; you never wanted to do anything but fade. You were oblivion made woman.
Yet you do. Haunt me. Haunt the world. You are in the crying of every child who loses their home to a war plane. You are in the screaming desperation of every refugee. You are in the blood and in the ruined soil. You are in the pain. You are in the hurt. You are responsible, so you are there.
I thought I'd never be able to hate you, because I loved you even as I killed you. Now, I think I have hated you. I have been able to fashion my heart into a blade and let it twist and twist and twist in my chest until I felt bitterness flooding my mouth. I have reveled in it, I have let it wrap around my skin and my muscles and wring itself around me in a strange sort of pleasure. I have let it fill my body with heat and bring me to a climax. Yet I do not think I hate you, not as a permanent state of being. I can no longer say I love you either, even if there is a scar in my ribcage that matches the one on your face. I exist in this strange limbo of love and unlove and hate and unhate. The contradictions pull at me like the river tide ripping the flesh off a corpse. I want them to stop. I want you to stop. Like your heart and your breath did in the water, I want your awful, awful presence to leave me. I don't want eight years of memories or eight years of love. I only want to remember your corpse, swollen and ugly and mutilated — somebody who cares so little for life should never have looked as beautiful and bright as you. When I drowned you, that was me making sure the outside showed what your insides were always like.
