Morning Glory

He had never worn a suit with that many threads lacing through the seams before. He had never worn a suit where the price was unfathomable to an untrained and unsuspecting ear. He had never worn a suit where the cashmere wool blend was similar to the thick fluidity of honey against his young and smooth skin.

He wished he did not know where he was. He prayed that memory would disintegrate from his ever racing and recollecting mind.

The 40-something people walking around like a stone had struck them in the head before they entered the church were facetiously placed. He cared about all but one of them. They all wore black. He understood why. He hated that he knew.  He hated that every time someone stepped closer tears formed behind their eyes. He hated them for it. He hated them for not knowing. He hated them for respecting and appreciating her.

He hated them. He loathed their gentle touch of another’s arm, and a meek and unproductive hug towards a distant relative. He hated them with his whole infected reality. But his blood didn’t curdle. His fists didn’t clench, and his heart remained silent and soft, with the subtleties of contamination, of course.

His anger only a figment of imagination at this point. His physical intuition remained unequivocally still. Hatred only rose through his head trapped from the extrication of a therapeutic physical movement.

He lay, irrevocably quiet, styled in this garish, ostentatious suit, an exploitation of the color navy blue, yet somehow utterly repulsive. He had nothing left but thoughts to think of.

Feelings weren’t reachable; his heart was completely lost in his body. That was the issue, he abruptly realized, lying there in an unseemly distress. His heart was lost, and there wasn’t a pulse of blood or a current through his veins. He was unable to balance his analytical and angry thoughts with the cathartic movement of running or walking or even sitting upright. He was incapable of providing any form of comfort for himself.

Why had he only been left with these thoughts? Would they remain prominent forever? His eternal resting tainted with hatred towards his family? He didn’t deserve that, that was apparent. He didn’t deserve to have his heart stopped mid beat as the chemicals reached its sensitive touch.

He didn’t deserve to have a mother that craved attention over his wellbeing. He didn’t deserve to die. He didn’t deserve to be manipulated and killed. He didn’t deserve doctor’s rewarding his mother’s time and care. He didn’t deserve denial and guilt, or even love. He didn’t deserve love. He didn’t deserve any of that anymore because he was dead, and dead people don’t love.

He didn’t deserve constantly reimagining his mother’s face. Her bottle blonde hair curled every morning, unsuccessfully, because of its untamed natural texture of dead hay. But why did everyone else seem to compliment it constantly? That’s all he could imagine now, his mother with hay for hair.

And his mind raced. He couldn’t stop imagining now how any of this is real.  How is any of it real if it just ends in this casket with this childhood of neglect and torture? How is his mother’s vile act acceptable and applauded? How was she still allowed to laugh when he was robbed of the sensation that tingled in his nose and spread through his fingertips? How could no one really know?

A panic attack was arising in his delicate mind, caged in his head. Caged like him in this casket. An internal conflict, pure to its name that it stays deep within him.

Her face flashed across his mind one more time. She was barely beautiful. Barely a mother. By definition only by birthing him did she even qualify for such an inexplicable and honored role.

After the consistent and fabricated inflections of feeding her child with execrable toxicity she laughed, but not the kind of laugh that is born from pure happiness, the kind of laugh that bubbles in your belly and overcomes your body with purity and love. The kind of laugh that is curt and sharp. A chuckled scoff more like. A disgrace to the art of laughing.

The sides of her mouth raising to the sky as her child coughed and threw up. She patted his back and accentuated a sense of triumph in her body. She flowed with exuberance as he cried. And cried. And cried. And only when she felt his heart begin to give did she get him to the hospital. Far past the ability to help, and far past the ability to cure.

She bought herself a cake and some iced tea with a single slice of lemon and waited until they were done with the arrangements.

She was like a Morning Glory, infectious and vivacious on the outside but deadly toxic when you trust with too much and love with everything.