Bloodshot

Lighting up a cigarette, my eyes drift to the ceiling and fix upon a long legged spider as she takes her many thin spindled steps across to a cobwebbed corner. At least I think it’s a spider, could just be more dust spinning in the breeze or one of those nearly invisible gauzy things that fall upward for lack of alternate ambition.

I should clean up around here but right now my eyes are stinging red, bloodshot like bugs squished against screens. Too many screens. Did you know they make special eyewear now, specific for people who stare too long at screens all day? Some sexy looking girl was pushing them on Instagram, something about blue light.

People are diluted. Nothing amuses us more than creating fantastic problems so we can then drum up costly solutions to those problems which we invented in the first place to distract us from what matters the most to begin with.

Love. What we wouldn’t give for just a little sweet taste of it on our bitter stained lips. Love for nothing. Love without strings and without end. Which cradles us and lets us run as fast and far as we need without ever asking why.

Turning toward the window in the fading evening sun, I wish for the darkness to hurry up and close my eyes tight as I inhale a sick deep drag. Flashes of summers as a child flicker across the back of my mind like those tiny racing seabirds which scuttle against the edge of the ocean tide.

Warm images close enough to touch, to inhabit. Tan and wild and untamed and free in the way only a child can be, because she doesn’t know she isn’t.

It is so fragile in the heart of a girl, the sword of the word at the base of the tongue, cuts on the knee, laughter over nothing at all. And everything. So absurd. I don’t want to be like other girls and yet I want to be like all of them.

I watch as a mother pushes her baby in a carriage (carriage? do we still say that?) down the pavement. I hear the kids playing basketball in the park up the street.  It’s been a hot one and perspiration pierces through at the back of my neck. It’s been a long fucking day. A long fucking year this day has been.