Letters to Strangers
To the editor -
I inhaled. The air flowed across my tongue, leaving on it a sour taste like muffled sex in the back room. I couldn't help but feel my heart sink a little, I'm sure it was awkward and visible on my face, but I stepped out onto the concrete anyway and made my way back out into the open world. It was purple out - the moon was barely glowing behind a stack of pale, dark clouds that blocked out the stars but created a heavy enough fog to make the streetlamps glower down as I slid underneath them. I had a headache. My face was itchy. I was sunburned. I could feel the heavy onslaught of depression leaking itself into the membrane of every skin cell, I let it sink in. I had no energy to let it go.
A month prior I had just gotten out of that feeling - the sun had come back and I was back to glowing and hopping around as if the budding daffodils could cure every ailment, and I was ready to start all over again to see what happened.
I hadn't taken my normal path home after kissing you goodnight. I had needed time to think. I had needed time to get that ever-present image of you sleeping quietly next to me out of my head so maybe
I could've sleep without the feeling of an empty gap in the bed beside me.
I trudged my way down the cracked concrete. My throat felt eroded. I was getting sick. I was sick. I had always been sick. Light disintegrated behind me as I loped my way into a the field, breaking into a full sprint, falling away into the darkness. I took the darkest path possible - the main road was not an option. And on that purple, dismal night I walked down the alleyway where I couldn't even see my hand in front of me, and I made it out alive. Somewhere I was out to prove something. Somehow. But I was happy. And luminous. I smelled like garlic and ground ginger and your skin and so the night was sweet and I could feel it all.
And then it was gone. Every ounce of it somehow slipped out and instead some sort of venom rushed into chest cavity, and it was only two weeks later, and it didn't seem worth it anymore. And now...
Now I can not only feel the blocks slowly falling away, but also see them. The way the circles darken each morning, the way everything itches, I never feel clean. I always feel nauseous. I get the feeling of wanting to go back to sleep and never wake up again.
I yearn for the feeling of being so high and slipping and crashing down the canyon into the water - and I said it wouldn't hurt, and you said it would be so painful, but it seems to almost bring peace to my mind. The plot. I fly. I land, and I expected so much pain that it was just numb and I floated away and never came back. That was all a dream. I don't have the courage to go beyond apathy. I know something of heartbreak, but not that kind. It seems like such a terrible thing, I would never want to put you of all people through that. But I can't stop that want, that necessity in the floating feeling I get, the lump in my throat, the welt in my eyes. That's how I feel. That's how I feel and there's nothing I can do to stop that.
There is no reality to it.
I'm a coward. I'm a coward of a strange type.
Stumble!