Floating Like a Lilo ── Itadori Yuuji (✓)

20 BURY IT DEEPER

I DON'T CARE IF IT HURTS
I WANT TO HAVE CONTROL

creep,
mxmtoon

          You have this very specific image of your mother in your head.

          Warm eyes that teeter with this placid hue, the colour of a sultry sky when daylight peeks out. This quiet, rare smile, reserved for few and the edges of her lips feel gently bent when that sheen of laughter glistens. The hugs, the bedtime stories, the singing in the kitchen.

           And then her convulsing body, skeleton jumping in and out, limbs twitching and eyes gaunt. The death rattle swallows up her voice, removing the last words. And then, she is gone. Out like a flame before it had even been lit. She'd be slumbering if the warm blood coated her like a blanket.

          It wasn't always like that. Smiles, forehead kisses, chin-on-shoulder hugs.

          Sukuna had shown you that there was someone else. Clear tears glistening with the disdain of the person you were becoming, removing all the memories of your old self.

          You're standing outside of her room - Mother's room - and you feel like you're crumbling. A cold hand on an equally cold door and the carpet feels like it's peeling back layers of your psyche with brittle bones. Skin hanging on by that one never-ending thought, that scream that doesn't stop.

          One memory and you're falling, falling into a pit of words you can't say, words that remain trapped behind clenched teeth and bitten lips - the truth... it's the truth, right? You know she was misunderstood, that she saw those things, those curses, too .

           It feels like your mother was a flower of death, a red spider lily webbing you into it's petals, and when you clamber to escape, you fall down the curve back into the pit of the bud. A laugh from her is the most alive you've ever felt.

           The weight of love is heavy; it is the most exquisite form of self destruction. You know in order to face the next day that you have to destroy what you already have.

         So you open the door. You open it.

          The past screams inside your head the moment your foot touches the creaking wood and you feel like you've been torn apart before you even knew how to sew. And the dust that gathers like faint, fake little snowflakes is just a reminder your seams are all jagged and you're stuck with crooked edges.

          Everything's still, blank and unseeing, wading through this candid portrait of a perfect stare and nothing moves except you, slow shuffles moving dust. It's unbearable how the world moves on after death. You can weep your ichor, love one like a death wish, but love and death only rot on earth - the pretence of an eternal emotion gives us false hope.

         You don't like how it feels like six years never happened. Twist that time around your wrist like metal chains on a braclet, listening to clinks and cries and watch souls wade and burn. Six years and this room is strange. It was your parents' room but you know that after Mother died your Father moved to the guest room, not literally, and not physically. He'd moved in a state of mind, sunken to the seabed of the ocean that was grief. He'd let terrible things pierce his breath and choke him until he pretended that room didn't exist anymore.

         Maybe it was the liquor that did him in, hug a bottle of gin and grin when it clinks because he can pretend it's two and not one and not him and not her.

         You suppose a similar case ensued with you; you mirrored that glazed look in his eyes, blotted out that door as if it was a painting, smeared it over and waited until it dried. Then it was non-existent. Gone. Just like her.