Beggar

There’s an icy rage inside of me. It’s not a white-hot rage, boiling over, kicking in the door and setting fire to your curtains. It’s a cold, vengeful rage.

“I know what you’ve done,” it says, and it glares at you with glacier-blue eyes and a throat of glass, condensation dripping down its steely cheek. It says it knows that you created me, and you destroyed me too. It says it knows you put the parts on wrong. It orders you, with a voice that cannot crack, to fix me. To pay up for your mistake. It knows you’re responsible. It knows you created this world and all the people in it. It knows you created sunlight and moonlight and mourning doves and watermelons, but it also knows you created me, so you didn’t do it perfectly.

“Confront your mistakes,” it screams, its eyes melting and its hands shaking. Look at me. Look at my imperfections and know that it was you. Look at this compassionless body and know that it was you. It was you. It was all you. It falls to the floor at your feet, as trillions do and have done for centuries.

“It was all you,” it cries, slamming the temple stone with its fists and bruising its soft bones. It has never believed in you, and it never will. It’s felt this blood on its wrists before. But it has to blame someone.

“It has to be you,” it says quietly, prone and listless. It wants to scream this into the empty room, its soft and broken voice echoing throughout the garish house your lovers made for you. It has to be someone’s fault, doesn’t it? There has to be someone at fault. There has to be. Otherwise the avoiding mirrors, the long showers, the hunger pains, back aches, apologies, spilt blood and tears are all just some fluke, like I’m some freak of nature who is incapable or evolving and adapting to their circumstances, whose laziness and incapability to change is their ultimate weakness, as if they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps tomorrow and tell the world,

“My mistake, I was just not myself for the past twenty-one years.”

Silent, it withers every day. Torn apart by its own anger, it shrivels and flakes into dust, eroded away by despair and hopelessness, until it is taken away by the wind, and all that wasn’t meant to be ceases to exist, restoring holy order to the natural world.