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IT IS SIX AM and what a strange thing it is to be beheld. the sun perches on the waistline of the horizon, swelling with love. she is in rapture, rousing into the cotton candy flush of day, and the sky bleeds outside her window. cat has been lying awake for an hour, blinking the shadows from between her lashes, peeling the last vestiges of slumber from her mind. she has been lying awake, waiting for the sun to see her, behold her, witness her return into consciousness. because the bed is emptier than it has ever been. because the air is so very still, and her breath stirs slow in her lungs, and her skin is cold. because it is silent inside of her, and she was beginning to wonder if she still exists.
but yes, she is here, and she is awake. the sun finds her between the linen sheets and laves upon her skin. she is warm with the pale morning, and at last she remembers how to move.
she slips from the bed and into the broadening day, stretches her arms above her head until her back gives an audible pop. she is here. she feels the press of her feet into the carpet. she feels the ache of her sleeping bones. she feels like a person again.
she waits a moment longer. for what, she can't be sure. perhaps she is a subject waiting for a witness, a lover waiting for her good morning kiss. but the bedroom is empty. the world is empty.
when she walks, the silence follows her.
///
she doesn't think of anything really. her head is so empty that she wonders if she ever thought anything while doing anything. if she had to think about how to move her hands when she twisted the shower faucet on, if she had to think of her skin as she rinsed sleep's residue from her pores, if she had to remember where to scrub and where to squeeze and where to lather. did she always know which jeans to lay out, which corduroy jacket to spread out on her mattress, which of her mother's rings to place on which of her fingers? was it always so easy, so simple as not thinking, as doing without being, moving without feeling the way time pushed around her?
she eats breakfast, but can't recall ever feeling hungry nor ever being full. she can't remember what she ate even, can only recognize that it was cereal by the sawdust and sugar ache in her teeth and the crumbs she finds in the corners of her lips afterwards. she checks the time and finds that over an hour has passed since she woke, but she doesn't quite know what she did and said between then and now, knows only that she woke and bathed and dressed and ate and did all the things humans typically did on a weekday morning. she knows that she has always known how to do such things, but somehow feels like she knows nothing at all. like she is reading off a manual. like she is playing at a person, performing for herself.
the rest of the world opens its eyes and the minutes pass so very quickly. she puts on her doc martens and slings her messenger bag over her shoulder. she waits at the door for two minutes. she doesn't know what for. it is so still, and she doesn't know why, but there is something so wrong within this place she calls home.
she leaves.
///
it is in the subway train that it catches up to her. the knowing. she is standing beside a man who smells of cigarette smoke and old, worn leather, who also stands like a puppet stuffed full of pennies and pillow fluff and hums when the train squeals on its metal tracks because he needs to make noise in order to know he's alive. there is an old woman with a soggy spine crunched over herself in a plastic seat to cat's right, her weathered fingers folded over the stem of a sad, wilting bouquet, and to her left, there is a young woman with stringy red hair and huge blue eyes that stretch across half her face, little skies bound around her pupils. and suddenly, she knows.
she knows the man is still a boy inside his bones, gasping for his mother's love. she knows the old woman lives with her heart outside her body, and that she goes to lay her daughter's favorite flowers at her grave. she knows the young woman will fall in love today and that he will break her heart tomorrow. that she will fall for a thousand more men and they will all break her, again, and again, and again, and suddenly she knows how she is beheld.
she knows that she is a new moon, laving in perpetual darkness. a beautiful ghost. a romanticization of a lack of existence without another's to fill hers out, light her up from the outside. but a beautiful ghost is still just a ghost and if the sun could not witness the moon, they would not know she was there at all.
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// hello lovelies! how was the first chapter? please let me know your thoughts and feelings and thank you so much for reading! please take care of yourselves!! love you!! //
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𝑎𝑟𝑚𝑠 𝑢𝑛𝑓𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔
Teen Fiction"i'm going to try to fall in love with you again." forever happiness is a simple concept to believe in when you're seventeen. youth is the most vulnerable time of life, the most naive, and love is a most dangerous addiction, a blushing ambrosia so s...
