Clouds have gathered above my head, tears landing on my open eyes. A seed of water traces its way through the blood, distorting the faded freckles with maternal gentleness. The urge to wipe it away is overwhelming – I reach out a weathered hand, but nothing happens. They remain lifeless at my sides, moss beginning to hug the naked bone of my fingers. Time is warped. How long have my eyes stared at the stars, yet only seen the darkness beyond them?
Rain fills the rush of footprints that circle me, eroding the prints they left that day – eroding the evidence. Old blood runs in rivulets as the water lifts the stains from the dark soil. This is the first rain since I’ve been here. I hope those boys are out there somewhere – looking up to the trees, seeing the flowers open their petals to the heavens. If I can’t see it, I hope someone can. I hope they see how lovely life is whilst they have it. I hope they properly disposed of the knife.
The moss has swallowed my hands completely.
I see their faces in the leaves above me. There were four of them – a close-knit group, the kind that would steal their parent’s vodka and replace it with water. I wish I knew their names. Did they continue with life? Go to therapy? Heal themselves? The gaping wound in my chest never got the chance to heal.
I don’t think they meant to do it.
I can feel the moss creeping up my neck. It tickles. I remember the moment it took my breath away and gifted it to the wind, when a family of young foxes borrowed my heartbeat for a struggling cub, and the daffodils used the light behind my eyes to grow ever brighter.
At what point will my soul go elsewhere? To fester in this rotting tomb is not how I imagined the afterlife. Shouldn’t some all-mighty angel be beckoning me into the clouds, or flame-throwing demons casting me into eternal misery? That’s what I was told would happen to me – the image so at odds with the beauty in which I find myself spending my afterlife. The promised flames have become dancing green ferns, swaying in the strong breeze above my head. The souls of the damned have turned into old, gnarly trees, their long fingers reaching up to caress the sky and embrace the rainfall. Screams of the broken morph into whispers of wind that laugh and shout high up in the treetops.
I don’t mind it here. I don’t miss my heartbeat, my breath, my light. They have moved on without me – they have left me to my fate of the ever-creeping moss.
I think it was an accident. The knife came out as a harmless threat, a fear tactic, rather than to injure.
I was dead before their panicked footsteps disappeared.
The moss has crept into my exposed ribcage now, threatening to take my decayed heart. I’m going to miss this life; the way the moon smiles at the world as it sleeps, the way the light turns even the darkest blood golden in the last few hours of the day; the ways we express our love for other people with words and poems and stories.
I hope that the moss will take me somewhere beautiful.
Featured Image Credit: Pexels
Journalism student at the University of Stirling & BRAW Magazine editor 24/25 and 25/26 🙂
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