writing_shadows

I’m lying in someone’s spare room.

You can tell it’s a spare room because of all the rubbish stacked up all over the place. There’s an old dress makers dummy in one corner, with a half finished dress stuck on it, so old the pins have begun to rust. There are old hat boxes, old books, and what looks like a lacrosse racket. I don’t think anyone in this house has played lacrosse in years.

This whole place is filled with the detritus of other people’s lives; just like me. I’m detritus now.

I know that sounds self pitying. It probably is. There’s a sickness in my belly that won’t go away, that hasn’t gone away ever since Jack kissed me awkwardly on the cheek and told me that the ghoul would look after me now. Ever since he left me behind, like a suitcase discarded at Paddington Station.

At least I am becoming better with these English cultural references.

I don’t know who this house belongs to. Not a vampire. I must avoid vampires for now, the ghoul tells me. I’m not exactly legitimate. I wasn’t Sired with the consent of a Prince, or Council, or anything of the sort. My existence, in that respect, hasn’t changed. I might not wear a yellow star anymore, but I’m still marked, intangibly, as a creature who shouldn’t really exist. I’m still marked as something bad. Something dirty. Something tainted.

I know. I know. The self pity again. It does tend to well up on occasion. I don’t know how to get rid of it. God knows, I’ve tried. I keep crying and I never cry.

Well, except when I’m angry. I cry then. I used to cry at Ed, normally in between throwing things or trying to hit him, while he looked confused and said something stupid like “I only went to Santiago, you silly cow,”

I miss Ed. I miss him so much it hurts.

A bit of me keeps hoping, I think, that he’ll come and find me. I don’t know why I think that. It’s not like Ed was ever a hero. Still, I want him to. I want to hear the wood of the door downstairs crunching and the thud of rapid boots on the stairs. I want him to throw open the door and pull me towards him, taking me away from the nasty stale corners of this nasty stale world. I want him to yell at me, to hold me, to kiss me, and then we can go and start again, somewhere new.

But instead I just hear the quiet click of the front door being locked as someone goes out, and then the slow stifling silence of an empty building.

I’m lying in someone’s spare room, where all the little bit parts of a family’s life go to die. I think I’m dying too. Oh, not physically. I’ve done that already, in bed in Berlin. But another part of me which somehow stayed almost alive until today is going. I can feel it slipping away, bleeding out invisibly onto the stained carpet. I’ve been thrown away. I’ve been thrown away like rubbish and no one is going to come and pick me up, or save me now.

It doesn’t matter that I’m beautiful, or quick, or clever, or passionate. It doesn’t matter that Ed once loved me, and that I could make him feel alive for a little while. It doesn’t matter that I wanted to change the world, or that people used to tell me how unlike I was to every other girl. None of that stopped me dying. And after I died, none of that stopped me from being thrown away.

So what does matter?

I stare at the ceiling. The plaster is cracking. It will come down soon. This room will be filled with rubble, with me underneath it all.

It would be easy to lie here and let it. It would be easy to just fade away, to wallow in this self pity, to cry over and over again about Ed who didn’t come to save me, or Jack, who did, but then threw me away when he was bored with me. It would be easy to cry over a world I wanted to save but wasn’t worth the trouble in the end. But I’m not going to.

A strange little trickle of warmth runs through me, and I remember how good it used to feel sometimes, to be angry. This isn’t quite anger. It’s flatter and sharper and has edges that sting.

It’s like carrying a knife inside me.

I won’t lie down.