I Always Knew I Was Rotten

I think I always knew something was wrong with my soul.
I always knew something was rotting beneath my skin. That the soft flesh of my heart was giving way to nothing. A sludge, held on by desperation and contempt. Nothing more, nothing less. Still it beats though, doing as it’s told to do. I’m not sure it knows that nothing is there anymore, just battered trash, a ghost of what it’s supposed to be. It’s pretending, wearing a mask so that no one guesses we aren’t really there.

I think I always knew my veins didn’t pump blood, but poison. Thick and hot, bubbling through my body. A toxin, leeching its way across my easily corruptible parts. I don’t know where it started, though. Maybe in the heart, turning me with a pump of the vessel.

Thump.

Maybe it started in my lungs, with each breath I desperately sucked in through anxious lips. Oxygen turning into venom. Love turning into bane.

Breathe, they say.

How? I ask.

Maybe it began in my bones, the very core of my body. The framework that keeps me upright, the structure of which I am built around. Because if there is corruption in the foundation, surely the whole thing would crumble down around it. Or maybe it would grow larger, stretching toward the sky—no one the wiser that the shapeshifter blending in with them is actually a demon in disguise.

Maybe this is just how I’ve always been: born from the grave, and to the grave I’ll return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Just in this case, my bones were formed out of the ashes of my last life, a soul just as dark as the one that currently resides inside me. One day, when I’m found out and burned alive, the dust will carry across the gravestones of all the lives I’ve lived and a new me will be formed. We will be just as dark. Just as poisonous. A moonlit flower with teeth.

I think I always knew I was rotten. I always knew. There was no shock when my brain registered what was happening beneath my delicate flesh. The surprise came when I began to accept the corruption.