Who’re your heroes?

My heroes are those people that, despite the pain inside their head, will roll on out of bed every

Single

Day,

Get up, put their makeup on, pull on their jeans, stare at themselves in the mirror and say
‘Today, you. are. okay’
Not superman, or Spider-Man, Captain Marvel or Thor, but those people who marvel every day, that they haven’t killed themselves. That every day they don’t wake up in a cell with padded wall and no heating, eating frozen spoon fed dinners next to orderlies and sinners.

See,

My heroes aren’t those people, who can fly a thousand miles an hour or lift a car above their head,
But those people that fight every. single. day.

Who’s mind will tread that fine line between sorrow, and despair, who pray to the heavens that just for once, please, make the battle fair.
That when their  life is said and done, they’ll smile and see their conquest won.

These people are my heroes not for showmanship, fame, plumb or adieu, but for the silent battles won,

A thing that I could never do.

I want to fade into the walls and hide, like memories or bad dreams or a fleeting look we think we spy among crowded eyes. A pipe dream, to live up to even memories of those who’s been before me, or even left the room before me, even while my heart still pumps that
cold,
black,
Fluid round my veins,
I’ll never be as good as them. Or funny. Or handsome.
The only impressive thing about my legacy is the pain it causes me. Irony.
I’ll never live up to their memory, my life almost ethereal, sounds and smells and sights flow through me, not too me.
Like I walking memory I wander through the streets I call my home, my mind, doomed to tread the prints of those greater, more refined, who’s time was spent with people who would look at them, not through them. Like I am a hazy window into the rest of the world.
Those who came before me, who’s thrones I travel by and through, their legacy, endless in its torment of my opaque existence, became my legacy, of laughter, at my expense, ridden for the brief high it gave.
All I leave this meagre and transparent world, is a shadowed memory, and words.

I peel open sleepy lids and roll over,
As vision clears a thousand hours of 2 second dreams from my eyes my first thought; who are you?

I climb up from my bed, who’s soft embrace betrays the horrors that lay within, pull over my nightgown, thin. A silken touch of finery. A lie, a hope it would refine me.

Traipse, do I, through cold and lonely corridors, head tilted down, pushing through a gale of memories and half stories. Suddenly fascinated by my slippers.

I glance up briefly, look at the figure staring back at me. Sudden my mind a torrent, maelstrom, gyre. My soul a fire that burns a beacon to the figure, a funeral pyre of sorts.

I dip my head once more, a whisper;
‘Who are you?’

Familiarity brims at the corners of my mind, while tiny little insects chew away at the edges of my sanity. I dip my head again.

Vanity was never one of mine.

The door to the bathroom presents itself, a mahogany monolith, a sentinel of secrets guarding the smeared lines between fact and fiction.

‘You can do this’

A diction I utter, as I twist the **** and push to door.
Shatter the monolith.
The smeared lines become kaleidoscopes.
My vision blurs, my hands, they shake.
My slippers suddenly become riveting.
A trope, a day to day, nothing new.

Deep breath in, deep breath out.

I step through the door, brace against the sink, raise my head and stare.
I stare at the eternal and never ending eyes of the stranger in front of me.

Their gaze burns through mine.

I steel myself, and look into my eyes.

‘Who am I?’

The glass shatters. The world falls away.

I knew this would happen.