Those words were like swallowing acid. As I read them letter by letter, breath by breath, they followed another swallow of burning, deserved, agony. The breakage beckoning between each syllable roiled in my mind for days, burning hell through the flowers I planted in me. And only minutes later had the very last one, within the husk of my heart, been rotted into only ashes and dust. Those words had roaringly echoed, bouncing off the walls of my veins until I bled them. They swam within my lungs stinging my breaths into choked and airless sobs. They dug into my stomach until I could no longer fit a meal within it and hunger was silent compared to that screaming scorch. Those letters echoed through my body, reverberating with every painful throb of my still beating heart. And then a memory flickered before death until it was irrevocably gone and to the fire, I surrendered. My beating heart exploded, spilling that shameful acid through my chest. It burned a heavy, flittering heat that burst through my body feverly. Tinges of burnt bile greeted my taste buds and then the floor before me, another wreckage to the world– from the wreckage herself.
I had been brought into this world knitted with mistakes, my life woven with faults, and a loom of infinite disaster. So I counted to ten, the most prolonged and dangerous seconds of my life. Awaiting the bile to slip, burning its way back down my throat, for the roiling acid to halt so my heart could continue beating again. Each number I counted, a fiery sob escaped my gaping lips and misted the world before me, setting it in flames too. And then a shiver crawled down my spine, bone by bone. Although I wasn’t cold. Only dying as glittering darkness stole my flowers and my beating heart. Stole my hunger and my breaths. But the aches and pains had been insidiously comforting. I deserved them and they could have me however they wanted. And so the silent assassin branded my body into something else.