There was a time where I was stronger than him. His words were snakes that I would swat at with swords. Yet, I can no longer stand up for myself. He has drowned my air with a terror that I cannot overcome. There was a point when I did love him, but then he went mad. I’d come home from work feeling uneven knowing that he was waiting with a bottle of ‘Jack Daniels’ already sucked down his bitter soul. When I’d run, he would follow, until one day he caught me and left me to die.

He’d taunt my life in front of me, knowing that he had to the power to destroy every inch of me. There was a time where I did love him, but that time I try to push away. I try ever so hard to forget. Some pieces of him still remain in me; some are just memories of another life, one left long behind.

The trepidation of an unsafe pair of feet approaching strangles me until I don’t dare to open my lungs. Imprints of heavy boots scrape across the red dirt trail. Each step he takes near me conceals theses protective barriers that I had built. As he trudges through the dusty soul, shivers shock my skin and I begin to choke, for even the task of knowing how to breathe had escaped my now vacant thoughts.

Fighting the urge to hold my breath, I locked my eyes shut as his arm extends towards me. “Why do you deserve to live?” he asked me, over and over again.

No answer I gave is one he accepts. I say it’s because all humans deserve to live. I say I deserve to live as much as anyone one else. I say I deserve to live, because I love life.
And he says I lie. He says I am not living my life. He says all kinds of things and I agree with him; every insane word he throws at me, I agree with.
Brushing his grimy hands across the wounds on my flesh, silence fills the air as he waits for another response to escape from my lips, yet nothing is to be said any longer.

Drifting the knife across my neck he asks me once against he same question. His eyes bulge from his sockets as he began to grow impatient with me.
As I peek up from my trembling bones, my blue eyes, once as vibrant as the sea, are now pale and empty as they fleet away in fear. Simmering tears splash into dark waters, slipping beneath the rippling surface of the murky pond. Cold winds hum a tune through the open gaps in the overlapping leaves. As their frail colours of brown escape each thick-bodied tree, they dance in the fall air surrounding the enclosure.
Carefully, I pull my legs up to my frail chest, trembling from the frosty gale, as I bury my skull in between them. Scuffed up and filthy, I protectively wrap my lanky arms around the scrapes of my knees. Blood seeps in the deep cracks of my lips as pain eagerly rips through the core of my body.
Nervously, my lips part and I begin to beg for mercy through raspy whispers.
The man I once loved draws a blade up to my neck and narrows his eyes that have accumulated madness.
“You said forever,” he spits at me as he wields the blade into my heart, twisting and turning it, breaking me apart.