Shame

We all have secrets. They fester under our skin, atop our veins but below the surface of our membrane. Eternally cankering away, awaiting their moment to be sliced to freedom. For some that moment comes; in honesty. For some that moment is forced upon them, the discovery a scalpel wielded by others that peels back ones flesh and rips apart the sinew - secrets bleed from there willingly, the vessel from which they came reduced to a shivering husk. When he died I started to cry in the shower. It was the only place I felt safe enough to do so. I'd turn the heat of the water so high it seared my eyes, burnt them in my sockets. That was the excuse for my tears. And as quickly as they were born from my eyes they were drowned. Circling the drain like a haunted may pole dance, waving me a solemn goodbye. My nudity made me feel sincere, but the mere fact I hid behind a veil of pain and forged myself a mask of water meant I was never candid. Instead I was a coward. Hiding from my own grief even in the one place I was truly alone. I remember once he told me that he cut himself. He didn't need to tell me because he wore the evidence everywhere I touched him. For him it was a moment of utter trust. In his mirror ball eyes I saw the loneliness he'd always felt fade a little, our true love made him less afraid of the madness he harboured. He looked away from me for a while, the dark sheet that wound itself around his truths was placed across his irises once more. When he spoke next my skin pricked goosebumps. I was so scared of his necessity to me in that moment I had to suppress a scream.

He said the way he felt inside his heart could not be explained by his words. Nor could his eyes ever weep for his anguish. So he took to the blade to make his eyes see his pain. In the hopes that the physicality of it would make his brain recognize the injuries, his ducts would accept its reality and give him the release he so desperately craved. But that pain was secondary. The cuts too shallow. I wish he'd stopped searching beneath his skin. It wasn't just secrets that drained from his body. His life drained away on the end of that blade too. So I saw it respectful of the tears he could never shed for his own life to hide mine at the loss of it. For every one that rolled down my face was bragging; boasting of an emotion he was too twisted to portray. I could never tell if he was more ashamed of the depression that haunted him, or the fact he liked marmite on pancakes. He was a boy of many quirks and I carried them with me when he left them behind. Dusting them off every year as a homage to him. I sit and I drink hot coffee from a glass, and I begrudgingly eat marmite soaked crepes. I think maybe I'm developing a taste for them, or maybe it's now just to me the taste of him. Not the taste of his lips that I remember, the sting of a chemical seasoning, but the taste of his memory as it is to me now. For all this talk of honesty I have yet to disclose my secret, because like the soldier of horror he was he wore the badges of his battles where all could see. And whether in the scars we both created, or in the sheets that cloak our secret torment within our eyes - we stand united in that fact. But the thing that makes me sick with shame, that writhes in my skin and plagues my stomach. Is not my grieving. It is not my love for him. It is not that I miss him every minute, of every hour, of every day. It is the horrifying fact, that sometimes, as the years have gone on; I forget to.