Beautiful People

The electricity having gone out, the entire neighborhood is awash in darkness as the snow comes down turning everything to a thick blanket of white. Off in the distance, firetruck sirens are screaming which at the very least suggests that some part of the disturbance is being addressed. After lighting a half dozen candles, I pour another glass of white as I have already decided I’m done for the night and continue skimming through a collection of old photographs of Kate Moss. Tanned and toned and thin as a rail with wide, wild glittering eyes, she is smoking a cigarette while strolling through a grand marble hotel lobby somewhere in Europe. So young back then, impossibly exotic in her black eyeliner and nude silk spaghetti strap cocktail dress. I remember being a young thing and obsessed with her seemingly effortless combination of disheveled poise. Gloss and glamour and grit in random measure. She wasn’t everyone’s taste of course, but as for me I fell for all of it. I was scrawny but she made me feel good about it even when some ignorant adult would tell me to eat something, you look sick and in my head I was telling them to properly fuck off. There is something intoxicating about watching a beautiful creature even from a distance, even when time has erased what was once reality. I light a cigarette and a few more candles and stand to look out across the street, still dark as pitch, and quiet save for the frosty droplets splattering against the windowsill. My phone lights up with a message from a friend I’ve not heard from in quite some time. I used to think that he thought we maybe could have been a thing but it was never right or wrong enough to really make a move. Now we text in quiet moments when one of us needs to feel seen and heard, just for a little while, before again passing off into the ether. You would be surprised how that feeling sneaks up on you. It isn’t loneliness but it isn’t without a little bit of fear, either. Fear of the emptiness in the abyss which is a life not anchored to fulfilling other people’s expectations. He once described the way my writing made him feel and to be told of the affect my words could have was an aphrodisiac I hadn’t seen coming. Perhaps that is arrogance, perhaps that is humility, who’s to say. Writers are strange people, we give and we take all in the same keystroke. We create and we destroy and we don’t look back on any of it. What was it Ms. Moss used to say? Don’t complain, don’t explain. I do try not to complain and it has been years since I felt the need to explain myself to anyone. Life is too short and no one knows what they are doing for the most part in any case. We are transient, unpredictable things. Untethered. I text him back something which borders on flirting, but the truth is I’m just bored.