Good

Once half becomes normal. One becomes all. It consumes you. I didn’t notice the changes at first. But there are moments. Moments when I feel my brain trying to work. Moments when I can see how easily I will become the man at the bus stop in piss-stained jogging bottoms smoking paper. Oblivious, if not proud, of stinking. Of falling from existence. At first I didn’t accept being here. I protested ‘I don’t belong’. Nobody believed I was scared. But I felt fragile at every noise. Every commotion in the hallway. Every policeman climbing the stairs. It is not the place that scares me. It is the dead end of my being that is stacked in every beige brick. But it soon becomes normal. It became home. There is no other place left to go. If only I could click my heels three times and be somewhere better. Now it’s three swallows and the place doesn’t look so bad. But it is not right. The uneasiness is rampant within me. I want to scream like the lady next door screams. This is not what was meant to happen. I am not supposed to be like this. But there is nobody left to hear. Screams fade down the hallway like cheap lager flushes down the pipes in this building. That is the cruellest trick of my life; that I have made every good thing disappear. I killed hope. The one thing nobody could steal from me. That is the torture most deadly to my existence. I killed the good in me. I was once a good girl with bad thoughts. Now I am all bad and I am so consumed I cannot stop the tremor. One turns to two. Two to three and three to four. Then they find me in my pissed stained jogging bottoms. Two to three to four weeks. If they find me at all. Nobody chooses to leak through their neighbour’s ceiling. In that body. Under that cheap fabric. Was somebody trying to be better. A good girl. A good boy. Somebody who could have been.