13

Collage & Short Story Created by Drusilla U. 

I was a heart in a cage, and you taught me how to bleed for mere applause. 

Author's Note:

    This was created on October 13th of year 2024, unfinished to this day. Still, I would like to showcase it on here. I'd rather have it on display than catching dust in my documents. It was a creation I fabricated on the whim, emotionally, during a point in my life full of turmoil where I had even tattooed myself and gave myself a piercing just to find a way out of the labyrinth of pain, to catch my breath and alleviate the festering wound. I truly felt like a circus monkey locked in the cage. Others with hollow hearts, eating away at my hemorrhaging bloom, my red inflamed heart with their sharp merciless teeth. Ripping at my heart and mind. I was truly helplessly confined by my own feelings, unable to free myself from this cage, everyone just watching and pointing. No one helping me. I was just a slave for amusement to this apathetic audience: a circus monkey.

music:

Liar by Lucas King

The Circus Monkey

September 13.

I wish I could return to this day and never have spoken to you. If undoing an entire meeting, rewriting the past, smearing that smile off your lips and telling you to stay away from me was an option. If it was a viable, realistic option, I would choose it. I would choose to have never gazed upon your unworldly eyes. Never to have stared into them and searched for my future within your endless blue lagoon, tired eyes.

Blue dominated irises with faint brown around the rim of your pupil, then faded clashes of green extending from this same brown. 

You were a curse, a malignant tumor in the shape of a woman.

I searched for a companion, somebody to share a couple memories with and fun times. Normal things, you know?  Instead everything wound up into a spiraling mess of mental hospitals, suicide attempts, screaming and endless nights of blood hurling cries for help. 

You turned my entire world upside down.

You turned me upside down; blood rushed to my head and I couldn’t comprehend the difference between love and attachment.

I was an impressionable child after all.

We both were.

You claimed to not know what love was, since nobody had ever given it to you. Not even your own mother. 

I foolishly took this as a challenge to teach you what love was by loving you unconditionally in the same way a mother should.

You took three years from what I wished to have been the greatest years of my life, of my adolescence. You took them and in the very end told me I meant nothing to you.

My life was already a whole lot fucked up without you in it, you just taught me that there was a secret level of fucked up beyond anything I had experienced. God you fucked me up hard. 

Guess we both did one hell of a number on each other, D.

D.

I’ll refer to you as D.

I don’t cry about you anymore but I still dream about you at night, my heart doesn’t ache anymore or spring out my chest with wounded gashes of pain everywhere. Stomach aches, migraines, loss of breath; it’s all gone and there are no remnants of it. 

It seems the ability to cry has gone as well. I’ll start welling up tears in my eyes, feeling pity for myself and drowning in this pool of self-misery as to how I let everything go so wrong. But then the tears came to a halt a minute later and no tears ended up streaming down my cheeks to begin with. I can’t cry normally anymore. I’ve wasted too many tears on you, night after night for months straight. Too many years. My body is regaining peace with the deceivingly simple but, in truth, insufferable double-edged sword that is the cost of purging. 

Purging my sentiments, my emotions.

Voiding.

I am empty now, my once glass heart has now become steel.

I can’t feel a single thing now, D.

I understand your incessant bouts of apathy now.

I forced myself to stop loving you because you stopped loving me.

I humiliated myself for weeks just for you to look at me, I behaved like a circus monkey with special acts just so that you would speak to me. Converse with me, tenderly lick my wounds as you once did, clumsily and yet with pure kindhearted desire to provide me with alleviation. 

I became a psychopath. 

To you, to everybody you are associated with.

They all shunned me and twisted their lips into a small curve as it brimmed them to full satisfaction seeing me fall apart.

The circus monkey has an audience and they love seeing how he dances and falls again and again.

How fitting.

How suitable. 

Stumbling, falling, crying out, bleeding, dying, screaming for help.

“He’s just a monkey, it’s a part of the circus act.” The crowd would mumble amongst themselves and nod in cohesive agreement. 

They laughed out loud at the unsightly image of the bleeding, once dancing monkey.