Quiet Rage, part iv

The iconic Hallelujah breaker of violence against women is considered in another woman.
Michelle’s story remains incomplete.
I continue to dwell upon her Hallelujah vacuum that risks entropy.
Thus, a fourth window into Michelle’s life.
( For the first pieces of the story, see: Quiet Rage, part i , Quiet Rage, part ii, and Quiet Rage, part iii)

And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!

_quiet rage, part iv_

Michelle was no stranger to feeling flat. She’d spent the better part of her adolescence leveled and two-dimensional on the 4-D stage of dysfunction that played out in her parents’ divorces and remarriages. It wasn’t the first time she collapsed onto herself.

She remembered well the first time. It happened on the day after her thirteenth birthday.

“Given this most recent cluster fuck occurred on my birthday,” she mused somewhat bitterly as she stiffly shifted her covers, “I gotta wonder if my birthdays are cursed.”

You didn’t need to be a lawyer to prove that she’d been the second accident of parents married too young. Their ore hasty marriage in a rural, Catholic church barely kept her brother from being born a bastard, but, like an heir apparent prince, he was one entitled son-of-a-bitch.

Michelle actually deeply respected her only brother, Eli. They were as different from each other in affect and space as the sunrise and the sunset. She often thought that the fourteen months that separated them were much like the number of hours between the changing of guard of the sun to the moon. Only son, Eli was easy going and warm. Michelle had always admired his easy laid-back nature, such a contrast to her own vibrant intensity. More water repellent than a duck on a pond, she wondered how her life could have been different if she were more like her brother. Her parents had posed this question to her so often since her 13th birthday that it was as reflexive of her to ask it of herself as was the mole that perched high on her left cheek bone like a sparrow was an aspect of how the mirror reflected the portrait of her face.

It all had happened yesterday, a mere blink, a pathetic, staggering breath ago that Michelle was barely thirteen, just a day plus twelve. Since then, even then, she’d always maintained in retrospect, that she should have known something was awry. Michelle never got what she asked for as birthday gifts. True, she opened approximations, clearance substitutions, and filler crap she could have cared less about, but this was the first time that she not only opened gifts that were exactly what she wanted, but received everything that she had asked for that year.

Like the harbinger it was, the next day seared upon her heart to never, ever hope to enjoy too much for herself. She was not worth it, and if she got it, Michelle certainly knew by now, it would never last.