Title: Tears
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: drama, angst
Summary: There are times when she retreats to the solitude of her bedroom and cries.
There are times when she retreats to the solitude of her bedroom and cries. There’s something cleansing about tears, about cracking the hard shell of her emotions and letting all the hate, rage, and sadness out in one uninterrupted flood of tears. To cry until her eyes ached and her nose was red and sore.
And then she washed her face–flipping her eyelids back to release the trapped salt deposits to prevent swollen eyelids–and crawled into her bed. It let her paste the plastic smile on her face with the morning light and pretend that everything was good, she was happy and nothing was dying inside.
Being able to cry was the only thing that let her face the days of boredom and abuse. She was a loser, but she could pretend otherwise if she tried hard enough.
Ugly, stupid, liar–the words thrown at her. She was uneducated and worked a dead end job with no chance at a better tomorrow. This was all that she had and it was not enough.
She lived in the poverty suites and raised her children on scraps and garbage, the food rejected by better stores. She tried her best and it was never enough; she was trapped in this life of broken dreams and empty promises.
How did that song go? “Empty belly life, no tomorrow life.” There was no one to save her and she’d given up dreams of a prince that would choose her to love.
The years were dragging past and taking her with them. At some point she would be too old to function and she would fall apart, her corpse tossed into a pauper’s grave and no one would care.
To be helpless and poor was to be invisible to the world. She was a shadow flitting around in the background, doing the work no one else wanted, and when she died someone else would take her place and no one would mourn her passing. Maybe her children would cry, or maybe they would shrug and say, “Too bad.”
She was Mama when they wanted something, otherwise she was an embarrassing appendage. Her unfashionable clothes and world-worn face were a reminder of everything they longed to escape. It was her fault they were born poor, without all of the rights and benefits of kids born to better families.
She had no money and no worth. It was only fitting that she cry in the shadowed dark of her lonely room with no one to offer comfort. She was human garbage, born to live and die and be thrown away.
No one had ever loved her and she’d lost the ability to love herself. At the end of the day all she had was her tears, her few minutes of helpless despair. Otherwise she marched resolutely through an endless stretch of days, her lips spread wide in a smile that refused to touch her glossy dead eyes.
/END
