Anonymous

Wearing my great grandmother’s diamond chip ring, I notice it catches on a thread and makes a pull in my brand new sweater. Figures. Fancy things and I have a love hate relationship, we get along fine for a while but eventually I have to strip everything off in order to keep it safe from my own clumsiness. The sky is shattering to pieces in dark gray shards of liquid glass just like the raining people all around walking the streets as night falls into lush focus. Thinking about anyone else, I listen to a frazzled looking older woman screaming angry curses from the front seat of a dilapidated blue sedan as it rolls on by through driving waves of flash flooding. All the bright lights of the city weep sad tales as they glimmer and drip upon wet blackness. In my mind are tears of both regret and relief, suspended together but which refuse to be released. To think of all the nights I’ve spent pulling myself apart to examine the designs of the things I can never quite see through until the end. Not without drama, not without angst. I talk in circles around the things I am afraid to get close to, carry them in little invisible bits instead. Under cover. Under wraps. Underneath it all there are secrets and each one lights up in me like a twinkling star until I swallow so much I become another universe blooming inside a hidden world. The truth is I don’t know where I belong. The angst is that I should know by now. I pour a glass of chilled white wine, savor the curl of it as it slides down slow. Feeling the tension in my body ease, I light a cigarette, inspect the damage to my sweater with dissatisfaction but mostly indifference, and stare out across the stormy skyline. It is stark, it is unfeeling juts of steel. Perhaps I, too, am a city of dirty white lights, glowing skin wrapped around shoots of tall metal bone. It’s so easy to fall in love with a writer. Like tripping down a set of stairs you somehow didn’t see, you mistake aura for feelings. Skill for intention. It is perhaps the ease of it which startles you most. How jarring the affection which pricks at the palms of your hands, the itch spreading someplace you can’t reach. What you wouldn’t give for a taste of the blood in the words. A world has been created out of thin air, a world made just for you that’s warm and lusty and does not exist. As you fall in you fall out, what is moving toward you is moving away. I take a drag and down more wine while your fingers rake through a young woman’s hair as you kiss her thoroughly and lay her out upon your bed. Her face shadowy, her scent one of many all at once. In the clouds I see your likeness, the muscles of your body like thunder. A sinister stranger in a place with no name.