FUNERAL ━━ c. diggory

i. twenty days

⠀⠀There's an analogy I use to define my existence. Ced used to joke and call it the milk carton analogy.

⠀⠀See, I'm a carton of milk. Bought fresh with the intention of being consumed, just as I was born to bring hope, innocence, and light, into my parents world. But sometimes, it just lays there in the back of the refrigerator, and everything else is slowly being consumed, but that carton of milk.

⠀⠀My mother was still a child of fifteen when I was born, and I've never known my father. I've always imagined what it was like for her to run away from home, yet still return to drop her newborn baby into the hands of her own mother, before disappearing.

⠀⠀God has a funny way of fucking up lives, and I think he didn't realize he was creating a living, breathing person, one with feelings, when he molded with his hands and placed me down in the mortal world.

⠀⠀The carton of milk begins to sour the older it gets.

⠀⠀Grandmother tried her hardest, but sour milk cannot be made fresh again. It was too late. Too late to discipline a child with wild emotions, issues with authority, and a turbulent life from the very start.

⠀⠀My issues with control might have started as young as five, when I stole the jar of Communion wafers from the Church and stuffed them down my throat one, by one, unable to stop, unable to control, until my insides were emptied onto the grass of the park my grandmother had begrudgingly allowed me to go play in. I was greedy as a child, but now?

⠀⠀Now, I just couldn't get control long enough to realize the gravity of my actions, the gravity of my emotions

⠀⠀The letter to the magic school had almost been tossed out as a joke. My grandmother had nearly fainted. Her good, Christian granddaughter, a witch?

⠀⠀She should've burned me at the stake the moment she found out. Lit alive, the flames eating away at my flesh until all that was left of me was ashes that filtered through the summer air like dust, because I have never been one destined for a long life.

⠀⠀Hogwarts was not as magical as I had dreamed of, yet I never thought I would be standing over the tombstone of the one person who actually loved me, laying a wreath of lilies down on the granite. I could handle the taunts, the chiding for not having magical heritage, the comments about my lack of parents, because he was always there, but now he wasn't, and I don't know what to do anymore.

⠀⠀God fucked us all like that. Cedric was the one who wanted to live, and I was the one who wanted to die, yet here I stand, smoke pouring between my lips as I drag carelessly at a cigarette. They kill you, something he chided me about countless times, but the thing was, that's why I smoked pack after pack.

⠀⠀Cedric was purer than I deserved. Innocent.

⠀⠀Maybe I should feel guilty about spiraling like this, but he's been dead for nearly a year, and I don't know how to cope anymore. I try to stomach it, but is it possible to stomach grief? Grief that gnaws away at you, disintegrates even the possibility of feeling joy, grief, which refuses to go away and has wedged itself into a crevice between the vertebrae of my spine, and has begun to snake its way around my heart?

⠀⠀A heart that's shrunk a little too much, blackening and atrophying away, until the only thing I can feel is the haze of whatever is in my system.

⠀⠀I'm self destructive. Selfish. Whatever you want to define it as.

⠀⠀My grandmother used to call me Hurricane Eden, because I was as destructive as one. I've destroyed everything, and everyone, and now, I can't even pity myself, or stand to look at who I've become in the mirror.

⠀⠀I shake. I cannot stop shaking. There's a tremor in my hands, and it won't go away, so the lines and scars have began to look lopsided. There's nothing uniform about the slice of the razor blade against my skin anymore. He used to kiss my scars, but there's no one left to do that anymore, and the raised bumps carve mountain ranges through my skin.

⠀⠀Cyclone, sour milk, it all tied back to my self destruction. Cyclones damage other people. I, damage other people, and I can't help but snap the bonds between anyone who's ever had a relationship with me, and myself.

⠀⠀‎I'm curdling where I lay, forgotten in the back of a refrigerator as everything else around me moves on. But I can't. I'm stuck. And I'm souring away, bubbling with spite and growing more bitter by the day. I shouldn't abuse the slack they cut me but I do.

⠀⠀Poor Eden Willow, with her dead boyfriend, and her absent parents, who dropped out of a magic school she was never very good at, and now lives in an apartment with her grandmother who can't even remember what day it is. I know now that everything I touch, self destructs, but Cedric, why did you have to go?