The border and the line – Candice Louisa Daquin

There are two people who live in my house

One hates the other

When she gets dressed she seathes with irrational rage

Undo good intentions, break promises, bury the light

Her reflection is an anathema

She didn’t ask to be

Born on a frigid wheel

Where half her life she is dunked in freezing water unable to breathe

And the other half sees the sun but knows she is soon to drown

Following the cycles of the moon like a lightning struck tree

Is hollow without its ghosts

They could be twins, she and me, but for the discrepancy

One is stable and reliable almost predictable

She can sit still too long, she can behave, she is smooth like a lucky pearl

The other doesn’t know what she’ll wake up as

Will it be full of a desire to hide from every living soul

Or flay herself

Or make love to her rage

Or sit quietly screaming picking at her scabs?

Will she try hard to “do what normals do” before floundering

And exposing

One by one

The unstitched hem of her irrationality and flounder

See, she knows it

The border and the line

Love and hate

Nice and fearsome

Just as she knows her eyes see too deep

Underneath the social lie

The polite surface

Where faux people demand to be trusted

And she’s never going to

One day pretend, the next day damned

Her mercury is poison only to those with expectation

She’d like to be stable but her emotions are daggers

They pierce at random

Paranoia, truth, paranoia, truth

Unfortunately she’s usually correct in her assessment

Of people and their shuffling tokenism

So burn brightly babies

You won’t eat her ashes tonight

She protects the girl who has a ragged heart

From further harm

She can’t ever be relied upon

She’s a convulsing spirit with no arm bands she can’t float

And it’s a lucky thing really

Since you seek to shatter her doupleganger

The last defense

Is usually your own

And I understand the broken

As they intuitively seek me

We eat our dinner together

Over broken conversation

And a shared silence where we need

No words to explain

Why children inherit

The mixture of right and wrong

Frayed souls, torn people

Pulled in two directions

First by others, then themselves

Carrying on the song

Of solid and insubstantial

You can destroy a person

And their pieces will reform

But they won’t be who they were meant to be

One watches the other

Wishing they could be reliable

And every day we wake

Unsure if we’ll want to live or self harm

The cut off a knife from your own hands

The stranger in the mirror when you look closely

At why you can’t act normal

And fit in with the world

One day pretend, the next day damned