How you ended up here with black heels creating a heartbeat in your feet, matching the lines of makeup streaming down your face, you have no idea.
The person eulogizing your grandfather, was labeled as a “grandchild” of the deceased. The man is someone you’ve never met before.
In a beige room, you’re placed in the back row, looking at the heads of people you used to call family. Family died with him. Or maybe, even before that.
The man continues his eulogy, staring into your eyes, knowing damn well he’s standing in your place on the podium. He’s standing above a box holding the person you called Papa.
Of course, you begin to stare back blankly at the short-term boyfriend of a girl you once called cousin. Now you call her Nothing.
The voice of Nothing’s boyfriend becomes drowned out by the sight of something even more painful. Sitting next to Nothing, is the source of your rage. Her mother.
Nothing’s mother is the woman who rubs salt in your wounds and sometimes even inflicts them herself just because she’s bored.
For a woman usually quite vacuous she seems to have a separate brain for cultivating pain within the people she claims to care for.
You sit behind her back remembering the knife she left in yours. The one she twisted when choosing to purposefully leave you out of the obituary only 24 hours ago.
People keep telling you shouldn’t feel too bad about it because she left her brother, sister, and another niece out if it too. As if somehow, that’s supposed to make it better.
The metal of the folding chair in the back row digs into your thighs. You’ve dug your nails so hard into your palms that they begin to bleed.
You do this to keep yourself from slapping the makeup straight off the face of Nothing’s mother. Causing your own pain instead because after everything you still wouldn’t hurt her.
Fake grandchild keeps rambling in the background while you swallow how it feels to be fucking pissed, but care too much about attempting to placate the feelings of Nothing’s mother.
Blood boils in your veins, while Nothing’s mother holds the hand of the person you call brother. Because yes, she even manipulated your little brother.
When you look down your hands don’t look like yours anymore. Salt water sticks your hair to your cheeks and tastes like swallowing fire when you bite your lower lip.
Salt water, yes. Tears are too intimate for the numbness that clenches your jaw to the point your teeth feel as if they’re going to shatter.
As the flavor mixes with the tang of iron a thick concoction of anger lingers in the back of your throat clawing its way down your esophagus.
You’re realizing that Nothing’s mother took something else from you too. The room spins and you gasp for air, hyperventilating.
In a split second, your lungs begin to feel with the grief which had been drowned out by anger for Nothing’s mother.
All you’re wishing for is to crawl in that ugly box and be suffocated by the dirt being shoveled upon it. You sit broken, stripped of the opportunity to say goodbye, all because of Nothing’s mother.
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