the space above my ears.

Intergalactic Intermission

Someone at this very moment has just arrived at home.

Their gait is more of a stumble, but there's still a certain eagerness to it.

Something beckons them, something gentle.

They are toeing off their socks, climbing into a bed.

You can picture said bed however you like because it's not just one bed.

It's 7 billion beds, all smelling different, all hypothetical.

Yours happens to belong to whoever is burrowing into their own as you read this.

It's one of those obscure things that remind you that you exist.

Like someone saying your name to get your attention or the fact that your phone number is a sequence of numbers that have only ever been used by you.

Of course, realizing you exist means acknowledging that it was you.

You made a mistake, as any human would.

Followed the wrong hearse, saw things you didn't mean to see.

Met the things about yourself you never wanted to know.

Not in the way one would think...it wasn't rolled off the tongue or spit into faces, it was something deeper, deeper than skin.

Something that brushes against the cold surface of the bone.

I know it, I know how lonely it is living in a lightbulb.

It's like you're in the fifth car in a gondola hovering miles above the rocky mountains below- it would be very pretty if you weren't alone

But you are, so it is instead the most terrifying thing you've ever seen.

Your panic is what erodes the rope, eating away it the fibers like acid until it breaks.

A red-eyed breakfast, improvised morning.

The salt on the tablecloth.

Salt in the water.

Water that breathes, the tide rising and falling like a chest.

Rewind this seven years backward, fast forward it four.

Three more days in the direction of the past and here is where you lost it all.

You whined the wrong name in your halfway state; repeated it twice so there was no mistaking

who you thought was the most beautiful in the room.

The mistake was honest, but nothing else was.

Therefore, they could be mad at every part of you but the part that screwed them over.

The part that smiled when you felt like dying.