Mud Vein

by Tarryn Fisher

No one wants to carry someone when they’re heavy from life.

It’s slow poison; you make them believe it’s real, and it keeps them coming back for more. Love is cocaine.

“Humans weren’t made to carry someone else’s weight. We can barely lift our own.”

“Maybe lifting someone else’s weight makes yours a little more bearable,”

Who is safe? No one. There is too much bad, too much evil in the world to ever be safe.

Hands could bruise or they could fix. His hands fixed.

He kissed me with color, with drumbeat, and a surgeon’s precision. He kissed me with who he was, the sum of his life—and it was all encompassing. I wondered what I kissed him with since I was only broken parts.

“You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.”

I shake my head. For someone like me feeling is dangerous. There is nothing left to fear when you’re already dying.

“There is a string that connects us that is not visible to the eye,” he said. “Maybe every person has more than one soul they are connected to, and all over the world there are these invisible strings.”

And yet he loved me. And yet I couldn’t love him back.

I was a self-fulfilling prophecy; destroying before I could be destroyed.

I feel nothing… I feel nothing…. I feel everything.

Until someone unlikely comes along and cracks you. They see every dark corner, and they get it. And they tell you it’s okay to have dark corners, instead of making you feel ashamed of them.

Love is a possession; it’s something that you own from the layers of people in your life.

“You have to believe someone sometime, Senna. When they tell you that. Otherwise you’ll never know what it feels like to be loved. And that’s a sad thing.”

Having a mud vein didn’t kill me; it saved me.

I did not choose you, and you did not choose me. Something else chose for us.