Borderline
written by: S. Rin
Outside, snow drifted down in slow, deliberate spirals. I should clear the driveway, I told myself, because it is easier to battle weather than silence. Silence is where my mind unspools, frantic and hungry, and I rush to fill it with noise; music, static, any sound louder than the voice I cannot bear.
I never believed myself to be a man in the way the world insists a man must be. Those constructs feel like ornamental cages, fashioned by hands that claim to know me. So I resist kindness, usefulness, anything that could be mistaken for softness. Better to be misread as arrogant than confirmed as weak, which I know I am, which I know everyone can see.
But I choose what harms me. My habits. My women. My choices. My mother.
My feelings arrive in avalanches; too fast, too absolute, until I can’t breathe beneath the weight of them. Guilt, in particular, is a language my body knows fluently. Responsibility repulses me, so I taught myself not to have morals. Two birds. One stone. A quieter conscience.
I lie; beautifully, constantly. Mostly to myself. Some mornings I have to negotiate with my own mind, coaxing it, bribing it, threatening it into doing the simplest, smallest things. My own internal hostage situation.
And my mother—God. I punish her with precision. I remind her first of tenderness, of some old sweetness between us, and then I sink my teeth into every wound she ever left on me. She doesn’t stop me. Maybe she can’t. Maybe she thinks this is how love repairs itself. But really, I just need power over someone, because I have none over myself.
I devour people whole. I wish the woman I love could see what she does to me, how she terrifies me, how she steadies me; yet pride is a jealous god, and I bow to it like a faithful servant.
To love her openly would mean surrender, a kind of nakedness I’m convinced I would not survive.
And still, she is the one thing I hunger for most.
Sometimes I look at her and think, “What an idiot.
I fooled her, too,” I tell myself.
But then she looks at me, really looks, and I see that she isn’t fooled at all. She sees the rot, the fractures, the unburied ghosts I pretend to ignore.
She is the only living thing in my world of corpses.
And precisely for that reason, I cannot allow myself to keep her.
I hate you. I’m sorry. I love you. I don’t deserve you. I wish I knew how to love the person who lives inside my skin.
“Allen, you alright?”
My neighbour Timothy placed his hand on my shoulder, warm despite the cold.
I shrugged. “Yeah. Just thinking. Need a song suggestion. Anything good?”
“You look panicked.”
And he was right, my heartbeat was sprinting, my bones felt too small for my body.
“Must be the layers,” I said, already stepping away. “Forgot the oven on. I’ll catch you later.”
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