Devour

I watched as the flesh ripped.
I watched as one frantically tore through ligament and bone.
I watched as one meticulously cut through the layers of skin, peeling them back to expose pulsing veins.
I watched as the insides became exposed to the outside.
I watched as they picked the rib meat delicately off the bone.
A flimsy fleshy noodle, they held layers of me with childish delight.
Opening their monstrously wide mouths, catching the tentacle end, with the tips of their flickering tongues.
I watched as they salivated.

One maliciously quiet, her eyes cold as granite, fair knuckles and cherry red nails.
One viscerally drooling, unable to contain his hunger, clammy blond strands, slick.
One sitting in relief, in fat grotesque pleasure, gluttonous and gorged and swollen.

Silently I grieved my story.

I watched the one who I knew so well, pull the organs out.
Wildly dilated eyes, I saw my own thick molasses blood reflecting off blue eyes.
The blue eyes that remind me of nightfall. Not daylight blue, yet not quite the night.
Blue, but once bringing relief to the day, knowing tomorrow was near.
I watched and I said nothing.

Primal screams bulbous in my throat, caught in a razor lined maze of anxiety.
Humid air drifting its way through the crevasses of my body. Whispering to my nerve endings.

Filled with hopelessness, I turned my head. 
I couldn’t watch anymore of this feast.
My body, my being, a quick relief for them.
I knew these creatures who found themselves delighting at their fleshy trough would satiate themselves.
The feeding frenzy was ending. 

I pressed my fingertips into the packed dirt. 
I felt rage. I felt animalistic. I felt empty, like them.
My nails lifting off the beds. Keratin shards, breaking and cracking.
The ending was near.

My dreaded dark, constricted vision. 
My breathing, more and more hollow. Gulping.
Instead of screaming and thrashing to an ambivalent God I never believed in, I gently looked at the horizon.
How beautiful she was.
That space, where the earth meets sky.
A place never fully present, because there is always more.
The moment between the then and the now.
Horizons never change, never settle, never bargain in beauty.

Escaping my body, floating through the untold.
I stared at the line between unknown and the known.
And in that moment, in that shift was elation.
Because what was now, will not always be.
And who I am, is not what they see.
And what I love, will always.