Barely Breathing

Coldness leaves her fingers numb as she breathes warmth against her skin. The bus is late once again.

She's holding tight on her plastic bag, wishing it was a warm hand instead, her eyes never leaving the direction from where cars pass zooming by her. It makes her blink as if it's a hard to understand fact, as if someone had just insulted her and she's just too shocked to react. 

Light.

Her eyes perceive it as globes of warmth, glowing and dispersing the darkness all around, bouncing around like multicoloured balls of plastic. But her heart is blind. The light in her eyes does not reach her heart - the poor mechanism could be dead.

Coldness bites her cheeks and there she is, biting it back in the corner of her lips, until rust drips on her tongue like warm honey-dew. She's left once again without any feeling, without the possibility to move forward or backwards. And images come and go flying in front of her eyes and she feels like braking down...

She's been broken so many times that she forgot the feeling of being glued back together. So many times has she been dropped on the floor, carelessly picked up and placed back at the start that her knees are more familiar to the coldness of the ground than the warmth of a sheet. So many times she heard bad words swishing the air like a punishment that now she does not even blink in front of all those piercing cussings and glares.

She's been there and back.

Hell was red and white, but mostly blue.

For she was the nice doll received on Christmas and put through a complete make-over with dripping make-up and chopped hair at the back, with lipstick stains peeling off her rosy cheek. She was the doll that was stripped off her clothes and forgotten in a wooden chest where she first learned the meaning of being alone. She been the favourite toy only to fall in disgrace, like all the Gods of the old Olympus, their lights flickering, forgotten on the bottom of the memory abyss.

She's been the bad guy, the lonely one, the one that would forever walk alone.

She's been there, she's done all that.

And now the bus is late once again. How heartless can one be to let another soul be bitten by coldness, surrounded by ice, swallowed by the whiteness of a dark snow?

The wig is coming off, she's tossing it away and cars try to avoid it, crashing one into another. She's tired of trying to go back to being the one she used to be: the doll that used to stare blankly from the shelves, looking all prideful and perfect with her locks of dark hair framing her oval shaped face. She's finally letting people see the stains of make-up covering her skin like the stains of a untreated acne. 

And stripped of all the gimmicks, she finally sees the light. It comes crashing into her, pushing her chest inwards, making the silence hum inside it. And locks fall open, rusty chains are put on fire, melted into silver and a beat is throbbing loudly, echoing in between her ribs.

She now remembers: there used to be a teddy bear once, a dusty one, all yellow and dirty, but the possessor of a warm heart and a kind smile. A teddy bear, one that used to hug her, hold he tight, making her feel powerful when all that remained behind was dust. There once used to be love.

She used to love.

But when the house burned, he burned with it, while she was saved by muddy hands when all she ever wished for was dying under her very eyes. And that's when she became someone unrecognizable: fake hair, fake make-up, fake posture, heck, even her beliefs were turned into faking. All that remained of her was a warm smile of the doll that once wished to make a someone smile, to offer comfort to the crying one and days of bliss when darkness would creep in.

She lost herself and spent decades trying to become a person that would be loved. A person. A human being with feelings, a heart without fear, a voice in the crowd.

She hoped all this time when in fact she was barely breathing... for she had forgotten all about her teddy bear...