Today it is simple.
It begins with caves opening to reveal blindness for little seconds before my eyes painfully adjust. Travels on up a steep slope that jagged legs, crinkle left and right to straighten, when everything is level. Ten minutes pass (remember: I’m always almost always lying about the time, but it’s only because I don’t remember), and on the eleventh, I’m wet with water that could’ve touched so many dead things before it washes over my lips.
But still, morning comes with clean. And when I open my eyes to streaming water I feel happier when it is not mine; let it wash clean my orbs, blaze them fire-dance red and inject some life between me and the paramecium waltzing on my lidded hallucinations.
It’s so I don’t get lost in the sound of the fan sucking up all the steam of me. So I can focus on two red dots collided with blood maps surrounding two dots of chocolate indecision. So I don’t have to dwell on the reason why clothes fade.
I try to replay to myself, as I do not hum, the happenings of the last few hours, what images flicked back successively to form a moving picture that I was present in. But I’m only at a loss and last night is less real than last year, last decade. I can feel the touch of feathers falling outside your door, more clearly than I can remember what I swallowed down yesterday as an attempt at breaking one of my many fasts.
Don’t let anyone tell you self-sacrifice isn’t selfish either.
I’m lost in déjà vu. Repetition yes, the same routine everyevery day except one. Although, sometimes some moments (so much, so many, all the time), completely out of the ordinary, and they’re there. Lurking behind that corner in that suburb that I’ve never once set foot in, in the voice of that person I have never met—or known; lived near, grew up with, exchanged childhood nicknames with, and yet—sometimes they smell more familiar than home.
The sky is starting to wake up earlier these days (this is summer twenty-one, just for the record), but it still won’t wake up earlier than me. There’s something ticklish about that. I say ticklish because it’s something you have to feel to understand. Something like a caught yawn that won’t right itself in your mouth and you mangle your face trying to push it out of your chest. A sneeze that speeds so fast it hurts. A lot. All the things that tend to annoy us more as we get older.
But everything is, generally speaking. I love the things that aren’t so clear-cut, that you have to think for a moment about whether you want to laugh or cry. I’m mostly caught in these moments—where I’m completely disillusioned and have no idea what I should invest my time, and self, and passion in—and in the same instance I’m falling over myself because my legs can’t keep me upright in the face of the dawn.
I occasionally (sometimes, always), fall over at the most inopportune times, inappropriately enthralled with things that aren’t so important to most. And I stumble on whatever useless thing I was saying, because the sky has more power than whoever it is on the end of that line.
Sometimes I think I’m at a disadvantage, because I don’t stare ahead when I walk. I’m mostly all or nothing, staring at the cigarette butts and condoms or falling headfirst upwards, gathering crazy looks from passersby as confetti I can throw up and let fall on my face like snowflakes I haven’t seen since I was eight. Perhaps this is why I tend to miss so many seemingly important things, and why I can remember how many ants were on that empty wrapper, that day I forgot how to say your name.