Lifers

by K.C. Blume

Death is a dreamless, smothering warmth. It’s the most protected I’ve felt in years, and it’s all the love I’ve been searching for.

There’s something cathartic about basking in the moonlight that sifts in between barred freedom, something poetic.

Like a crow, we love shiny objects, and there is nothing shinier than a silver lining around the storm cloud that is Elsberry State Psychiatric Institution.

I want to crawl beneath her skin. I want to rip her open and carve my name onto her ribs just to live close to her heart forever.

understand what it feels like to be outside of yourself. My body doesn’t feel like my own when he does it. It feels like this fucking shell that I’m trapped inside.”

If she wants to die, I could help her. I could die with her. I could dance with her in the afterlife for all of eternity if only it meant I didn’t have to feel her loss.

For once, I allow myself to feel it all. The beautiful, terrible sensation that love is. It explodes like a supernova inside of me, a prism of light erupting in my vision before all things fade to black.

If she is death, I am happy to take her hand and walk into the afterlife.

A lifer, sentenced to remain between these white walls even after death.