The good ones will watch for your pulse throbbing on your neck; the way your pupils dilate in your star-struck, out-of-luck, wide-cast eyes. They’ll hear the hitch in your breath, the sudden stillness in the air as your chest constricts.
You will not live; they will never let you. If you’re as good at the game as they are, however, they might let you survive.
Hold your head high and look like you know where you’re going. You don’t have to know; just make sure no one knows when you don’t. Walk with a purpose; make sure each step is sure and precise. Don’t trip, or they will very surely and precisely use it against you. You don’t have to feel confident so much as you have to portray it. Don’t falter, lest they have you portray a lot more fear than you actually feel.
Are you scared? Don’t show it; the good ones are watching. Wear a turtleneck. Don’t let them see. Look ahead- not at them, but after. You don’t want to challenge them, but you don’t want to concede by looking away completely.
Your ears are your eyes. Listen. The leaves will rustle when they are near, whether or not there is a breeze to disturb them. Do you hear that, the silence? They’re close. The rain stops to patter and their victims cease to sob. Flowers will grow to face away from the sun and water will flow to fill the sky.
The hairs on your skin retreat into their follicles as they approach. Their bitter, bitter song claws at your inner ears. Their breath, shallow and haggard and thrillingly cold, tickles your skin. They are above and below, here now and beyond, inside and out. They force themselves into the folds of your brain, pushing beyond its limits into the cracks in your skull.
They hit.
They hit.
They hit.
They hit until cracks become gaps, and gaps become holes. They spread everywhere as you desperately attack them, unseen, your brittle fingers driven to evict them from your suffering soul. You scratch at your head, where it began. You scratch at the rolls on your sides in which they’ve wedged themselves between, the concavities below where they now reside within. Like in the empty space that trails behind, the one above is occupied by them.
Like a siren to their roots in your image of self, they sing. They sing and they chant and it is all consuming. It is all you will hear, live, breathe, and eat- they make sure of it. Their song will sound from your neck to the rhythm of your withering heart, forcing its way out through your eyes and onto your view of the world. It’s hard to see through it all and you fall. You’ve let them see.
They are the essence that seeps from your soul when you weep; the daggers that leak from your eyes when you see what you have become. They are the edge to the words that you speak, the callousness to your fingertips as you surely and precisely rake them over your body. They aren’t just in, on or around you; they are you.
Your mind is hollowed out; your heart is bottomed out. They’ve ripped your guts right out of you to make more room for themselves. Only a shell of the person you were before, and yet you’ve never felt so whole.Â