is anybody out there

tie a rope around your neck, and let me kick you off a bungee I can hear voices, hushed tones (they're talking? About me? Über dich!) from somewhere beyond the tree I cling to, somewhere in the darkness that consumes me. My body tenses, shakes and I grasp the reality that I had made a fool of myself before an audience (Dummkopf) - I can feel my ears reaching forward to pinpoint the location of the sister who does not speak the language. I'm almost taken aback, almost forgetting that the tongue from my lips is not common, that I speak apa's language over my first - that this child of his does not know, as though she has been forgotten, as though her rite of passage into the Indomitable's offspring had been brushed aside. I lay an ear back, turning my head to the general direction of her confused voice and speak, licking my lips as the common language strains against it. "I'm surprised you don't, as a child of Volterra too. Hasn't he taught you?" Mockery hides behind my words, a rush through my veins because I am better. I may grieve for the loss of a mother I could never truly know, may feel crushed by life's difficulties, but I found a way to climb back. I had spent too long imagining false conversation sparked between my family, whispers behind my back, too far for me to hear, teasing me for the eyes I do not have, for the mother I have lost - I can imagine that big red cloud of hate, of schädelgesichter, with their demeaning tones aimed at me, the weakest, the vulnerable. They mock the Damned, the forgotten child, the rotten fruit dropped from a withered tree, I would hear them curse me for the sight of me, rotting and mutilated - and now the rot remains, wafting from my skin and radiating from the crown atop my head, providing some sick form of comfort as I recall the childhood I never had, the childhood that remains before me as I listen to the children surrounding me confirm their Helovian descent. Someone addresses me, head tilted their way as they ask if I'm alright. Am I alright? Am I alright? (Nein, nein - nein) I was so far from okay, I was down on my knees crawling through glass, through the same bubbling lava that swallowed my mother, I was down on my knees before life, I was choking with every breath and my lungs were threatening collapse - I was not okay. But I smile, I stand, I'm dusting myself off because I saw what happens when you let life get the best of you, when you let it push you down into submission, into hopelessness, into selfishness and despair. It ruins you, it ruins everything. So I lie through my teeth, I stand up before the unnumbered audience and I offer a simple, quiet, "peachy." A third, Helovia, ripples through the group, and I can feel my stomach twisting, churning as Otem, az arany gyermek, brings up the mutations, the magic, the greed of the Portal. It's hunger for all things magical, for my sight - I grind my teeth together, still unnamed to this group of Helovian children, just a strange child speaking a language none can understand. I must be an oddity to them, bewildered and flighty, but the venom lacing each word is threatening, challenging against each child because they are perfect. I do not need eyes to see it, to know that life had favoured them, had brought them gifts on golden platters, had given them the best lives in the short span they'd walked on this earth, and it makes me seethe. What had I been granted? Where was my companion to grow up beside? MY perfectly fit together family to rely on? Where was the privilege that allowed me to walk through that Portal and keep everything? I sneer at the mention of it, I let my features wrinkle subtly, let my ears draw back and body shift because I bet they had all slipped through spotless. "It took my sight." I spit it at their hooves, covering the fear, the overwhelming anxiety of returning to the darkness I had escaped for a moment, a moment to breathe before it swallowed me up once again.

oops got skipped i guess?