What she saw before is gone now, replaced by gray dishes in a gray sink beneath a gray window beneath the clouded winter sky. The kind of sight which is a presence all its own, with its own weight and skin and intention.
Steady. Slow. Melancholy.
Life is for the ignorant and death is for the curious.
She has become the circumstance and the story. Her mind floating in the middle of no beginning and an uncertain ever-ebbing end.
All day she smiles and tries to blend in. Whittle away at the space she takes up.
The thought of rejection scares her to bits but the thought of solitude is her only comfort. Wanting to be alone and not alone is an exhausting mind-stretched space to inhabit so she opens a bottle to drown out the ricocheting pressure of the need to make any kind of decision one way or another.
In or out. Yes or no. Forward or back.
Truth or dare.
They tell her a hobby would help or maybe a man but she isn’t sure what help is supposed to actually mean so she picks up some arty shit at the craft place up the street and stares at it until finally shoving it all under the bed, lighting a cigarette and staring off into the gray distance.
Never minding the gray dishes in the gray sink.
She doesn’t want to draw this feeling. She doesn’t want to paint the terrible.
Writing is the only thing worth anything to her but that’s the problem right there: writing isn’t like anything else and it isn’t a hobby.
It’s everything real and sacred and true and it is the only thing that can save her because it has to.
It has to.
.
Photo by Victoria Volkova