Pills and Red Feathers
By M. T. Coombe
The thought comes to me with painful clarity as I look around, this time staying would hurt as much as leaving, and the city lights and the rainclouds are no longer the edges of eternity I believed them to be. It’s scary to suddenly have these kinds of thoughts. But the unchained, cracked-open feeling within me scares me more.
The room is a safe kind of quiet. It’s not the oppressive and heavy silence that I’m so familiar with, the kind that can happen when you’re alone all day. This quiet feels soft. The feel of morning sun in my mouth and warmth beneath my fingers as I pull back the shades, and the whispering arc of red feathers in flight.
I’m so disoriented when I open my eyes that I honestly forget where we are for a few seconds. “Up, up,” he says, his cracked, just woken voice as much a part of me as anything in the vacant hazy light. The world around us was blurry and full of glitter and the light was bleeding in too fast, too quickly, every colour at once.
Out here at the edge of the city the sky is a patchwork of all the loneliest places on earth, and at night, I often imagine what it would be like to just fall off the earth like a cliff, plunging down into the infinite darkness of space. The stardust would fill up my lungs, making me lose my breath and choke until I was nothing but feathers and moonlight. A blank dark space where nothing hurts anymore.
The dream shatters. Small remnants of peeling skin and scorch marks and pieces of plaster. His hair is crowned in blood, but his face looks at peace. Tie ribbons around my grief. Return to sender.
We start falling because we were the only thing keeping each other upright, the only thing left for each other. I can’t focus on anything when all I can still think about is how bright the moon is. The night above is full of stars, brutal and clear in a cold sky. And I remember he is not here anymore. We exist on two different planes now. He no longer belongs to the city, nor does he belong to me. He belongs to the sky. A boy like that belongs to the stars.
All I have are puzzle pieces, and no way to put them together.
There is a line of pills on a shelf in my bedroom. Sometimes I will sit there and count them. Sometimes I will name the colours of each one out loud. It is a process that grounds me. They make both living and dying easier.
M.T. Coombe is a queer multidisciplinary artist living in London. He is fascinated by the idea of modern fairy-tales. He often combines the words that he writes with the artworks that he makes. His writings are based on youth / obsession / loss / nostalgia / memory / dreams / mental health / folklore and apocalyptic landscapes. Find him at: www.trashprincemusic.com and https://twitter.com/trashprincemuse.