Hallowed Out by Jess Wygle (read ebook pdf TXT) 📕

I am a shell.

A hallowed out stump of a person.

I used to be full. At one time, I was full with you by my side. Perhaps I only believed myself to be full. Perhaps I was only full because you filled with all the right stuff, the illusion-worthy stuff that made me believe in fairytales and happily ever afters.

Whatever the case, now I am hallow.

And you fill me with all the things you don't want.

Doubt, shame, self-loathing, guilt.

And, though you wouldn't think it possible, you fill me with emptiness.

How can you fill an empty space, a gapping pit of emptiness with more emptiness? However it's done, you manage with such ease and sinister satisfaction.

I'd rather remain hallow.

All the while, I scrape relentlessly to rid myself of your offerings, to clear the rubble with scuffed knuckles and bleeding fingertips. Despite all my efforts to free myself, I fail.

What's worse, I throw my own vial reproach in your direction. I position in an unnatural stoop, contorting myself to your level in order to best deliver my blows. I do this as a defense, though my retort is always received as reciprocated malevolence.

As if I'm trying to balance scales. Scales that exist only in a distant realm where validation reins supreme and opinions lose all color. They live in black and white, yours are clearly and inconsequentially right while all other's inherently wrong.

But in our world, on our plane, these scales can never be balanced. There is always room for grievances that couldn't possibly be calculable or mutually understood to the fullest extent. We are both victims after all, in our own way and by each other's hands. We drain so much energy trying to decipher who was been wronged worse, like trying to tie our shoes with two left hands.

So, my hallowed self is now a receptacle for your trash.

The things your curse under your breath about me.

The things you say to others when my name is mentioned.

The things you force yourself to believe about me to cushion the ache of your own inadequateness.

The things meant to weigh me down.

They're vicious, heartless little things that your wrap in deceiving but beautifully colored paper. You pretty-up the ugliest parts of you and gift them to me with ribbons and bows, and tags that read, "My Self-Loathing, To You" or "My Wrath, For You" or "My Misery, Best Wishes".

You cover all the nastiness in costume. It's not in effort to confuse or surprise me, mind you. You're putting on a show for those watching. You want people to see you as a good guy, as a victim, as wronged. You want me to be bad guy in their eyes. You fear what they'd think of you if they knew the wolf lurking just beneath your t-shirt.

With no effort at all, no remorse and from a place where compassion has been long dead and its ashes blown away in the wind, you drop all these devious presents at my feet, leaving them in my hallowed precipice.

They tick tick tick.

Tick tick tick.

They blow. Burst and become my problems. Your own shame is now my shame. Your own guilt is now my guilt. Their sharpnel buried so deep, woven into my bones and blood and being. They're apart of me, no longer apart of you.

Over and over and over, no matter how much I bleed, no matter how deep the scars, not matter how agonizing the pain and torment, I still yearn.

I yearn for your approval, your satisfaction, your kindness.

I dream of you in pieces. I pluck you apart in my head, like tweezers to a brow. I keep the parts of you I love most and toss aside the things I don't.

The piles are uneven.

Gathering the pieces I favor most, I roll them in my hands, knead them on the table top, delicately sculpt and manipulate until I have something else entirely, a newly formed figment of you.

It's you without the you. It's completely different but perfectly agreeable.

It's not the garbage-slinging version of you, eager to destroy me entirely.

I covet my little sculpture, holding it tight when the rubbish piles up inside my hallowed self. Piled so high now. Almost to my eyes. I fear I'll drown with name-calling and passive-aggressiveness lodged in my throat, suffocating me.

The more gifts you give me, the more unrecognizable you become. Your face is now only oddly familiar, as if a product of deja-vu. You aren't anything like the person I once knew. Because you too are becoming hallowed. You are empty and I am overflowing, what was left of me smothered to death by what was once you.

I am buried beneath all of your heinous offerings.

I am no longer hallowed out.

Though I wish I were.

Publication Date: 08-28-2018

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