Not As We

She couldn’t tell you what day it was, or what month in what year. She couldn’t tell you the name of the president, or even her name. She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t tell you anything about her past, except how empty it felt. Time to her was a relative concept, something that passed entirely unevenly, no set rhythm or mark. It was day when light filtered through the cracks in the walls or the slight part in the black fabric on the windows, and it was night when she could no longer see anything, there was no such thing as an hour, or a minute in her world. Time was marked by the light, and it never seemed to move in the same way.

One day would move quickly, its memory forgotten with the rising dawn and break of day through the cracks, yet another would tick by so slowly it would seem as if the day would continue on forever. Not that it would matter to her; she did the same thing every day. She’d wake when the sun was barely filtering through the tears in the walls and she would go into the kitchen where food would be magically waiting for her. The same as it always was, though she never hungered early, she just wanted to make sure it waited there for her.

Her motions were deliberate as she wandered the house, looking for the cause of the stocked refrigerator, but the cause was never to be found in the old house. She could never find why everything was the same as it had been the previous day.

She would scan the house for awhile, a few hours, before giving up as her stomach growled. She would give in and take one of the items out of the fridge, eating whatever she laid her hands on, no matter how odd it would be. A raw egg, a bottle of ketchup, anything. She didn’t care for the taste, for it didn’t even register on her mind. It was as if her taste buds hadn’t worked in years.

Her clothes would always be the same, the old red dress with the torn hem, mud caking the bottom of it, and no matter how much she’d worn it, it had never torn any more than it was at present, and the mud never flaked off. Nothing about her changed, she remained the same each day. But she didn’t mind. She didn’t even notice.

She would strip the dress some time after she would finish eating and step into a bath, sliding into the water and holding her breath under it for what seemed like an endless amount of time. When she emerged, she would run a soft lathered cloth over herself, washing herself clean, not wasting a single drop of soap.

After her bath, she would stand in front of the only mirror in the house, naked. She stared back at her reflection, tears tracing down her face. She didn’t know why she cried, but as she looked into the mirror, the tears escaped as lines began to appear around her chest, making the shape of a heart on the left side of her chest in deep scar lines.

As the tears fell, she began to feel emptier, like there was something vital missing within her.  The skin the scars framed would turn cold, frigid to the touch, as if it were exposed to sub-zero temperatures. She would raise her hand to it, feeling it’s coldness and look back into the mirror. She knew exactly what was missing. Her heart, it was gone…

She couldn’t feel the beat of it in her chest and she could no longer hear the steady rhythm of it in her ears. Suddenly, things were clear. She knew she was insane, she knew that her lack of feeling would never go away, and her emotions would never return. She knew, as she stood there in front of the observing mirror, that this would be the only form she’d ever take. She’d be frozen there forever until she could feel once again.

But that would never happen; her only source of feeling had gone long ago, taking her heart with him. He’d clawed it out of her chest and never returned with it, and as she cried, she could almost feel the memory that returned to her as if it were happening all over again. She remembered what it was like to feel abandoned; she remembered the sadness and depression that swallowed her whole, not releasing her. She remembered these feelings, but they were only shadows of feelings that had long been taken from her.

But she could continue to pretend as the day repeated itself, with her waking every morning in the same dress and repeating the same routine. She would continue this as if it were just another day. The sun would rise, and it would set, and she would end up in front of the same mirror, finding the same scars and crying the same tears.

She would stand and wait for a man she thought would never return, but would be the cause of her emptiness for the rest of eternity. She would look up to the ceiling each day and close her eyes as the last tears fell.

“Day one, day one
Start over again
Step one, step one
I'm barely making sense
For now I'm faking it
'Til I'm pseudo-making it
From scratch, begin again
But this time I as I
And not as we”