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If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

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One day, I dared to face my reflection.
My hair, greasy and stringy,
Had grown to brush my shoulders.
My skin had acquired the grayish hue
Of a dead leaf.
The hollowness of my cheeks
Revealed a tomb within,
Its walls shrouded in spiderwebs,
Its floor carpeted with dust and bones.
Those eyes rimmed by dark shadows
Should have mirrored a wild beast’s,
But the surviving modicum of sanity
Pierced through my squalor,
And at this ghastly echo of myself,
I shuddered.

Izar, if that crash, instead of killing you,
Had fractured your limbs,
Marred your beautiful face with scars,
Or even confined you to a wheelchair,
Extinguishing your motocross dreams,
You would have still found ways to shine.
You would have challenged yourself
To defy the world, to carve a path
Through the wreckage and rubble.

Izar, my beloved Izar,
You had filled my days with wonder,
You had taught me that life is worth living,
That dreams are meant to be chased,
That courage should be wielded
Even in the face of despair.
Yet, I failed you daily
By being incapable of moving on,
Of doing something valuable
With what remained of my life.

Your death had crippled me
In ways no transplant could repair,
And every day forced me to wade
Through a tar-like mire of anguish
That threatened to suck me under.
I would never become a comic book pro,
But maybe I could aspire to normalcy.

Armed with an electric razor,
I sheared the oily tangles off my head,
Airing out my reddened scalp.
Then, I tamed the thicket of my beard.
From beneath the mask of neglect
Emerged a stranger’s face.

My body had become a rusted motorcycle
Sinking into cold muck.
Yet, I dragged myself outside.
The sky, once colorful, now a gray shroud,
Cradled the lone sun, a shriveled ball
That pulsated like an ailing eye.

My hometown teemed with creatures,
Rubbery, bulbous-headed aliens
That gabbled in shrill tongues
To the devices they cradled to their ears.
As they floated past, they ignored me,
The shell-shocked wanderer
Gaping at the ruins of his city.

Although I had missed the final exams,
I was granted a high school diploma
Due to my exemplary grades
Along with some extenuating circumstances.
The weight of a job would have crushed me,
And I couldn’t commit to a college odyssey
When plans might shatter suddenly;
All living beings are branchless twigs
Flung into a raging river,
To be tossed, turned, and tumbled,
Dragged under and spat out.

The dot-com bubble had recently burst,
But in my seclusion, I had befriended the internet.
Curiosity had led me to download Dreamweaver
To figure out the bones of websites.
I had come to decipher HTML,
And understand the potential of CSS
To lay out sites and style their elements.
I had lost myself in Flash animations,
Brief escapes that sparkled in the gloom.
Perhaps I might withstand the grind
Of a year-long web design course.

Soon enough, I would expose myself
To the scrutinizing stares of classmates.
Like you rode to the mountain and trained,
I forced myself outside every day.

At times, the growl of a motorbike rose:
A throbbing, rumbling bass dense as lead.
It made me picture a blaze of yellow,
A comet streaking through the darkness.

Amidst rows of desks and students,
I sat rigidly, my hands clasped,
While I burned,
Engulfed in a cold, black flame.

At the witching hour,
Covered by sweat-damp sheets,
I knelt on the mattress,
Eyes squeezed shut,
Digging fingernails into my scalp.
The following day, I would confront
Those classes, those strangers,
More judgemental eyes and voices,
With a mind gouged by insomnia,
Without you by my side.

Clenching my teeth, I stifled sobs.
I punched the pillow over and over.
That night in nineteen ninety-nine,
How could you have sped in the rain?
If you had headed home like you said,
We would have traveled through Spain.
One day, I would have married you.
We would have raised a kid or two.
Instead, I suffocated daily
Under an unrelenting landslide,
Buried alive.
Why had you offered me a future
Only to fuck off and die?

I begged the void for silence:
Leave me alone. Leave me be.

Through the numbness clouding my head,
I realized that some fresh-faced classmate,
Their eyes brimming with the naivety of youth,
Had turned toward this blank mask of mine.
That kid’s mouth contorted, forming words
That sounded like spoken underwater.
After translating their alien utterance,
If I understood that a response was demanded,
I had to first push through the filter
Of “Why bother answering? What’s the point?”
I forced myself to cobble together a sentence,
Then hoped that the words wouldn’t evaporate
Before my tongue could shape them.
By the time my lips were about to part,
That classmate, weirded out, had moved on.
In my inscrutable face, they saw themselves;
Some apologized for bothering, some got pissed,
Others shrugged and forgot immediately.

I shed tears at mundane sights:
A patchwork quilt of sunlight
Glowing through the slits of the blinds,
A sunburst in which dust particles
Shimmered like dozens of tiny crystals,
A wildflower poking through a sidewalk crack.
Stripped of skin, I was defenseless
Against any force that grazed my flesh.

Unannounced, unwanted,
In class, in crowded shops, on bustling buses,
A swelling heartache would ambush me,
My eyes flooded with tears,
And I found myself gasping for air
While in my mind, an unforgiving sentence
Blazed like a burning brand:
“I let her die alone.”
Once, amidst the indifferent throng,
I collapsed to my haunches,
With my face buried in my palms,
As I mumbled apologies into the void.

I bought a weight bench and weights
Along with a barbell and dumbbells.
Working out to failure became my addiction,
An escape, a punishment, a way to feel alive.
As my muscle fibers tore, my limbs trembled,
And rageful groans erupted from my throat.
Pain is the sole genuine language:
With each of its words we are graced,
It tells the truth.

Although I had engaged in a course
Imparted in a vocational school,
They had planned a graduation ceremony,
And I was obligated to participate
So I could collect a piece of paper.
Around me, gleeful classmates buzzed
As they organized a dinner outing
To celebrate the milestone together.
Diploma in hand, I was drifting away
When one of those kids approached me
Brandishing an unburdened grin,
And invited me to tag along.
I replied, my voice flat and detached,
That I wasn’t interested.
“You sure? It’s your last chance.”
I turned around and walked away.

When I flipped through my notebooks,
I discovered, or rather remembered,
That sketches had colonized many spaces
Between notes taken in messy handwriting.
In one sketch, drawn with an ink pen,
You were seated astride your Suzuki RM125,
Your boots planted on the ground,
Your waves cascading over your shoulders,
While you stared blankly at me
As if reminding me you still remained.

If only for your sake, I racked my brain
Struggling to come up with story ideas,
But a single narrative crystallized:
It charted the wild adventures
Of Izar Lizarraga, motocross queen,
A seeker of freedom, a lover of speed,
Who traveled on a bright-yellow Suzuki
To find a place where she belonged.
However, no matter how fast she rode,
The demons clung to her heels.

In a desert stretching into the horizon,
Its towering dunes like waves in a sand-sea,
You raced at breakneck speed,
A silhouette against the setting sun.
You followed a winding mountainside trail
Along a sheer cliff’s edge
Overlooking the crashing waves below,
To end up leaping across a chasm
While the ocean’s spray enveloped you.
Through a tempest-wracked landscape,
As lightning forked across leaden clouds
And thunder drumrolled,
As wind and rain battered your skin,
You welcomed the sting,
And roared onward, undeterred.

You had been a streak of flame
Cutting through the night.
How could my art illuminate anyone’s existence
When the light of my life had been extinguished?

Hadn’t your love been wasted on me?
Given how bright you had burned,
A better man would have been inspired
To blaze new trails for you.
Had you also, in choosing me,
Acted recklessly?

I stored the keepsakes of our love
In a sturdy moving box, its surface marked
By the scuffs and stains of time:
A sacred reliquary for the dead,
Whose cardboard lid I lifted
Whenever I needed to delude myself
Into believing your heart still beat.

As an adult, shackled to my ever-aging body,
I found myself conscripted into the workforce,
Even though I had been carrying out my mission:
To remain tethered to your ghost.

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Tuff Ghost” by The Unicorns, and “This Song Is the Mute Button” by Jason Lytle.

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.