V

Black Heart
I guess in a way I’m just a corpse now; a brittle reminder of how the world can rip a soul from it’s body. My veins run blue, processed by a cold heart. My eyes turn a shade darker everyday, reflecting the darkness in my mind. The people closest to me look and see nothing but a tombstone. A message written clearly in stone, Forever lost in the valley.

The living people, they don’t understand. They try to make sense of me, wondering how the dead could walk, could speak, could smile. I walk in unearthly fashion, speak with a ghastly tone, smile with death in my eyes.

No one knows what happens when your body dies, but when a soul dies, it is an experience only those who are dead would understand. There is a loneliness that comes, an old man walking haggardly towards you, and when he arrives he rips your heart out of your chest and eats it. Smiling as your blood drips down his cheek.

Then there is a hole, uncovered, broken. The tongue loses it’s power, the only words that come from it are scattered, remnant phrases of who you used to be. The dead settle in, and never speak. Those with dead souls never settle, and are always looking for a way out. Blindly, they view the world from their casket, made of skin and bone.

With a cut or bruise they remind themselves that they are still alive. The pain, the only real thing to those who have lost the right to have a soul. It is the blood that reminds them they are still not at peace. A river of reality to their minds.

They say the dead cannot speak, but those who have lost their soul can hear them calling. Whispers from their loved ones now in the grave.

In many ways they are outlaws, bordering between life and death, caught somewhere in the middle where nothing makes sense. Recovery, nothing more than a thought. Hope, nothing more than a dream.

Dreams never make sense anymore. Dreams are broken down into ghastly images and remembrances of what would have, could have, should have been.

They can never relate, the living. For they see the world in different eyes, living eyes. The soulless can see, but only through dead eyes. The world turns black and white. Color is forever lost on a palette of grays.

Blood red is the only color left to see.

Whether it’s theirs, ours, or something else.

Sadness is the only emotion, mastered like DaVinci’s inventions. It is written on the underside of the tongue, covered only by the past use of words before the loss of the soul. It is written in their eyes, covered only by a shroud of skin. It is written in their hands, slow, delicate creatures that they are.

It is written on the black heart, dead, crumpled, buried.