Badge of Honor

How well can you know someone before their bruises become your bruises and after time has erased everything good and when only evil remains, the sky turns to burnt ash and is heralded in on coughing wings of dread, then your bruises become their badge of honor.

Honor, where is it when silence stops singing to you and though no sound is carried on the breeze, the cacophony in your head drowns out your better judgment and all reason vanishes in a fog of self -doubt. Your mind becomes the only room you recognize, sterile, clean, and dull. There is no character, no color, and no art. Only the knowing that you cannot break anything in this place.

This place, if that is what it is, is pale green and pink made of thick plastic and glued down. Sunshine comes through blue frame painted windows as strands of yellow yarn taped to walls and stretched to a white spot painted on the floor.

Everything shiny that sparkles and gleams has been removed to a place you no longer dream of.

Dreams are for those with hope and hope no longer rides beside you but hangs from a stick in front of your face like a carrot that you will never taste. Forever chasing and running out of breath until the pain and heat in your head becomes intolerable and you can actually see the fever that consumes you. The fever that burns with a rage behind your eyes painting everything you see in the glow of uselessness.

When the fever breaks and sweat beads on your forehead clammy and sticky all that’s left are those bruises. The ones that others wear on their lapels to show the world their pride.