Blister

All the things we dare not say swirl around in our stomachs like a thousand butterflies beating their slim shaky wings. I press my lips to the glass just to feel the cold against the warmth of my tongue. I touch a hand to my cheek just to feel like maybe I’m not alone.

You pick me up in your sleek black car and we wind our way through the back country roads, all dotted with deep red farmhouses, endless fields, silos, horses, and sprawling mansions with those heavy wrought iron gates at the end of their miles and miles of driveway. One of the more obnoxious gates is adorned with two giant fierce looking metal eagle statues on either side, all angry eyes and talons clenched around what appear to be two blank blue globes. I guess if you are going to have a pair of mean gigantic raptors at your front entrance, they may as well be screaming.

The afternoon light is fading into a deep orange glow, the way it can only in between seasons. Somewhere suspended between a blood red winter and a pale yellow spring, the light blends itself into a peachy mist and begs us to hang on just a little longer.

As we walk along the tight downtown street, I notice all the people crowded inside the Irish pub and my insides buckle and cringe. Even from outside looking in, I can hear their fevered breathing, see the diseased air hovering over their soggy burgers and fries.

It’s all too much too soon and too little too late and I guess deep down I knew it would be but seeing it happening in real time is enough to blow your mind. How easily we forget, or try to. How desperately we cling to the hope of going back to whatever it was we thought we loved so much but mostly took for granted until they took it all away.

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Photo by Kyle Mills