Mia Riojas, Dynamic
CW: Violent ideation
There are always the moments after. Quite a while after, when she has resolved her tears and put herself in order. When she catalogues the blankness of her expression in the mirror. It is then where she wishes she’d done something. Wishes that when her lungs had heaved it would have escaped not as a whimper but as a scream. That she would have shouted herself hoarse and breathless, concise yet so inscrutable in her language that when there was finally room in the air for another voice that still there were no words to be said in reply. That for once he was silent.
Better, she imagines, something wordless. That she would’ve wrenched a knife out of the drawer and sunk it into the countertop, threat and promise both, or torn down all the porcelain bowls and fine china to the ground and stood amid screams of breaking glass, and not even feel it when they cut her. She would feel it when they cut him.
In those moments she imagines herself as a storm. Beyond feeling or thought, merely a force of wind and destruction and fear, a divine force of retribution. That in the short moments before wasteland there would be a reckoning of all the things done and said, of the trenches worn into the floorboards and the rumble of tanks in the cracks of light seeping through closed doors. That everything will all be so nonsensical then, all of it. That it will all be nothing more than regretful rubble.
She imagines these catastrophes the way one imagines the aftermath of their death. Speculates on who might cry and who might be softly, guiltily relieved. Who might be enraged. Who might be numb. Distant prospective paradoxes, imagined outcomes she would never get to see.
These are the soft impossibilities she allows herself in the stillness of that mirror. With her fingertips flat against the counter as clean she left it, because even he knows there are some places better left forbidden. The vicious sneer of bloodlust in the twitch in her brow as she pins back her hair. The delicate fantasy in the light of her irises as she wipes away her tear tracks.
She rarely accounts for him entirely, because in the end he is merely secondary to it all, a foil to imagination. The shrapnel of the grenade, where she is the explosion. Thoughts of him are too material, too sharp and angled and concrete for her fluid rage. He appears only as a prop.
She makes these wishes because it is her only proof they could ever become more than one. Proof that she has marked in herself every grievance, that every whimper holds the wake of a choked back scream, that every murmur is the receipt of a real argument. That there is something inside her with the potential to be something other than inert.
In the moments after, the quite a while after ones, she always wishes. Wishes she’d done something. Wishes she’d let herself have her explosion. Wishes she’d let herself be it.
And when her hair is fixed in place and the tear tracks are wiped clean, she smoothes down her brow and blinks until her eyes harden.
She leaves her explosions on the counter, as pristine as she last left them.
And she flicks the lights behind her.