It drips and splatters over her forearms. Crusting along each delicate finger joint and congealing where it packed into the curve of each cuticle. Painting her skin gray like the dust of age and time.
It drips onto her shoes and stains the hem of her shirt. It falls in spinning splatters to soak the denim of her jeans in thick drops.
In this mess, she gives birth to something new. There, by the potter's wheel.
When you grow up a certain way, you may know what the cat feels when it shies from your hand
She tastes like the metallic burn of blood.
She smells like the pop of wood as the fire consumes it.
She feels like the static that clings to your clothes.
She looks like lightning as it cracks the sky.
And he fancies himself Zeus.
That sobering moment when you are brushed by death. Only by proxy; a tragedy twice removed.
But you see different, taste different, feel different.
Confronted by the fragile state that is humanity. When death is more than just mortality and morbidity.
Floating without even grief to hold your heart. Unbroken and unsure.
My biggest fear is the fade of feelings between two people. When you know someone so well, you can guess the next words out of their mouth. When the feeling of their hand in yours or their arm around your shoulders is more familiar than your own skin. When you could have picked them out of a crowd from any angle. When they call you because the tone of your texts changed and they wanna make sure you're alright. When the sound of their voice is clear as day in your dreams. when the smell of their shampoo brings back a hundred memories. When their hopes and dreams are the goals you work towards.
Somehow, suddenly, there's space between you. Someone else is higher on their list of priorities. The Space and time they asked for just to get themselves together stretches long and silent between you. When the constellations you memorized in their freckles fades to a random spatter of dots. When the hundreds of shades of color in their eyes fade to solid rings of primary color.
When every little thing you spent time learning about them fades, your brain un-learning its favorite things. When the connection you felt so easily between you sputters and dies even when they're sitting right across from you. When you have to start wondering “should I tell them this?”, “can I tell them this?”. When they don't come to you with their problems and you're too nervous to tell them yours. When you go from seeing them every day to every other week to “I saw him a couple of months ago”. When they used to be your best friend and now they're just a stranger whose secrets you still keep.
10 o'clock is the new witching hour. When you've run out of tv and fanfics to distract you from all the free time your wasting every day. When anything productive you could be doing with your time, anything that would mean something to your life, Writing, playing, traveling, trying to get published, Anything that you want to do for yourself is going to take too long and cut into the mandatory time you have to devote to outer society. Be it work or school we have to pay a time fee, an emotional fee, a physical fee, just to exist here.
10 o'clock when all the long hours of your short days are used up and out of reach. When it's responsible to go to sleep. To get those 8 hours so you aren't quite as dead to the world tomorrow as you could be. When the doubts and insecurities come creeping in between the hours of sleep and distraction. You dig for another show, video, book, fic, song, anything to keep you going until you feel like your eyelids are just heavy to fall before your thoughts get the better of you.
When the emotional vulnerability makes you fragile and everything from your voice to your reflection or hell one stray mannerism makes your self-esteem take a dive. Back in the good old days, all we had to worry about sneaking through the shadows in our rooms were monsters. Demons come to take your soul. What do you do when you are the demon. When the shadows are under your eyes. When all the ambition in the world has been pumped into since your ears opened to this world but as soon as you focus enough to see it. All you see is how it's wrong.
We're still kids. Whether your 17 or 30 your still just a kid. Because the definition of adult is emotionally stable. 3 kids, 2 cars, 1 husband and more zeros than you can count. Being an adult means maturity and when they've spent your entire life feeding you pretty lies about your future, how are you not supposed to feel inadequate?
I was wrong. The clouds are moving. Only slower than me.
They've cleared the other side of the trees now.
And when I can breathe again, so will I.
It's sun down now. The early stages of it, where the sky is still full of light and color. The clouds are thick an mountinous. And completely still in the sky.
The big lumbering breaths are blushed pink around the edges. Deep scores of grey over every curve and crevice. Dense and almost palpable.
It looks like a painted back drop.
And I have no where else to look.
I can only scream my feelings through the open window of a moving car
When the wind steals the words from my lips and smothers them before they can be heard
in other words, the chaos that paves the path from birth till death
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