You don’t fall in love in this room.
What are you trying to exorcise, you strange, exhausting girl? Every single object that surrounds you has a plastic casing of significance, gathers the dust of stories only you know, leaves water rings as if eagerly embedding permanence on your behalf. Every object has its rightful, certain place, like you are forever on the brink of conducting a séance. But Jesus, girl, what are you begging to enter into the space? What do you need to harness so desperately into this room? What are you trying so hard to breathe in? What is it that you can’t push out?
You think I can’t see it? You address the unflinching demon in your pillow, howling in that way you and the flattened thing have agreed is your most effective way of communicating. You beg time to rush forward and deposit you elsewhere, out of the path of the constantly falling rocks you have shaken from their place with your ridiculous pain. It can’t be like this, I can’t keep doing this, a whole decade of this will paralyze me. You cannot be reasoned with. You cannot loosen the stiffness in your neck so that you might turn your head and see the sun coming up. Of course the fucking sun comes up. Of course it does, but that’s the point, it’s just tomorrow, and I want ten years from now, holy God-chunk of a choking hazard, just a day when I’m not in this room.
As you sink uncaringly into the bed you hear it like a fucking car horn, a cacophony of voices – yours is probably in there somewhere – doing its best imitation of the Furies, torturing you from out of scratching reach, branding you in reminder that that longed-for day will not be better. What makes you dream that you will be freer when you are older? What do you think happens in another room? What silly things will you scatter around yourself then like a foolish pharaoh buried with his favorite toys in the tomb? The world gets crueler to the aging, and your longing is so long. How you will beg for the freedom to bay into a pillow that is only tasked with holding up your heavy head.
Stop looking around at the cracks in the walls like you’re facing people you’ve disappointed. You never promised them anything. Your youthful metabolism and unoccupied womb and drug-dealer relationship with sleep signed the contract for you when you were preoccupied letting the person out of the cage. Don’t turn over and beseech the shithead enabler in your pillow. And don’t look up at the ceiling – you know what’s one floor up.
Ignore the aura pulsing out of that plastic bin. Stop imagining the way the warped and dust-coated floor might complement the constant stiffness in your neck. It won’t feel like sliding into place.
There is a deep breath in there, I know it. Just when you think you’ve got a real slacker manning the operation in your chest, it will do the thing and you will feel the expansion. You needlessly complicated girl, just accept the relief and shut your eyes. No, your mind never powers down, just tires itself out. Stay away from the quicksand in the darkness, if you can.
So here I am laying on the car horn. Jesus, girl, I know you know this normal and acceptable thing to be true: You don’t fall in love in this room. But I accept your refusal to assign other meanings to the works hanging on the walls from all your many Periods. Do the healthy thing and flick off that one whirring cog in your brain that says MAKE IT FIT INTO THE NARRATIVE. Don’t bother. It’s not linear. You don’t fall in love with yourself here either. The walls aren’t witnesses. The objects are, and you will carry them to the next room, and they will gladly help you remember – they just won’t help you edit.
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
