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I'm a lost soul, so broken not even the devil wanted it, or me.
A life was gone, a spirit is taken by the ever-cruel winds of this hurricane I cannot escape. Sucked into its core; nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
We start out clean though, don’t we? A blank page in this so-called life.
Was I ever loved purely? I have only ever felt hatred and pain, is it the world that blackens you?
The dirt seeping in, poisoning your existence. No matter how hard you try, you cannot scrub yourself clean.
Or is it the people who brought us into this place that makes us this way?
Trying to find your way through the dark nights and endless days, that’s a nightmare in itself.
It's so lonely being this shell, this vessel that spills unclean words, lies, and stories. I don’t know who this person is. Surely she can’t be all I am?
It's easy to say you’re fine, it's easy to hide behind the smile. To fall behind the wall of panic and apprehension. It's a cold dark place. It's safe there. It's home.
It's getting harder to breathe though, harder to hold up the walls. The façade of ‘yes sir,’ ‘no ma’am,’ smiles over pots of coffee, chitchat over pancakes; it's too much for my jittery soul. This life of misery, surely it will be over soon. I have a choice to wake up or to jump out. Finding the strength and courage to do either? Now that’s the hardest part.
On the sixth floor of the hell I call home in Queensbridge Housing, Queens, I have been here for as long as I can remember. The same dark, cold room with the same gross overbearing smells that seep into the cracks of your skin. The rancid smell of urine flows up from the bottom floors and stairwell, up to us at the top. The elevators never work, I have to take the stairs daily. Trudging through the rank corridors, stepping over and around drunk, drugged up bodies that just pass out and stay where they fall. The roaches and water bugs crawling over them, the floorboards and in and under the doors. There is always loud music, fighting, screaming, gunshots... the works. I still get snickered at, spat at and misused, hounded for money and cigarettes by the homeless that squat inside the building.
My door is at the end of the sixth floor, it's a living hell of dark horrors. I live here with the Devil and her menacing men. I cook, I clean, and I serve them. It's not a place I want to be.
In my room all I have is a small cot that sits to the far wall, a dresser, and a chair that I sit at to look out the window that you can never shut. It doesn’t matter; it's not like anyone will be coming up here...to what...attack me? God knows her dealers do enough of that as it is.
They did try to board it up once, there is one board still hanging over the top. I laughed, it's not like I'm going anywhere, or that anyone can get in, I am six floors up. Who would want to come save me anyway? I’m a dirty, unclean waste of space, that's what I have been told so many times. And no one below knows of the torment that I live in. The hell that is this life, shit, it's Queens, the slums, the projects, them down there...they can’t help me. They can’t even help themselves.
The rats are my only friends, coming to sit with me each and every dark night... the nights are the worst. It’s when her drug lords come to collect payment. I’m like a modern-day Cinderella cooking and cleaning, locked away in the dark room high up, peeking down on the world below me, from my window in this hellhole with creaky boards, wet walls and the tears of a woman who wishes for this to end.
Dirty dark men with breath that smells of whiskey and hands that reek of cigarette smoke. Bodies that push me into the cot night after night tormenting my mind, taking what they want so roughly, so hard, releasing their filth into my body. I can feel it swirling around in me, seeping into my blood, tainting me forever.
Night after night I curl up into a ball with a tatty old blanket that I have had since forever. It really does nothing to keep me warm or hold the nightmares at bay, it's just become a habit now.
My name is Timberly, I am twenty, I work at Big Red’s Diner, down on 6th and 10th. I am misused, lost, broken, dirty, and alone. That was until I laid eyes on the guy with the dragon tattoo who smells of ink and musk, mixed with the smell of smoke.
I get lost in books their worlds so pure and magical, so unlike the world I live in. I read about men with eyes that illuminate one's soul.
Filth and grime, dark demons, nights filled with fear, days that are so bleak, no light filters through its endless pit of damage. A world of panic attacks and nervous episodes. Welcome to my life...