Coffeehouse-October 2013

She was sitting in the basement, thinking about stealing one of her mom’s cigarettes for kicks but decided against it, she had never been too good with lighters. She laughed in the dark partly because she knew herself too well, and mostly because she could again.

You see the past year had been spent thinking about writing a self help book titled “Dear Everyone: The World is Indeed Not Your Oyster". It all started when the was winter a little colder than usual, took too long to shake off the goose bumps, she was still shivering at the beginning of the summer. Wishing for a straw to lodge into a lung for air because as far as she could tell she found the oyster, but the pearl was just so easy to choke on.

Those pearls. She was wearing the same ones when it all fell apart and of course when it all fell together again, she was a creature of continuity. Doodling full circles on her arms and tattooing them to her memories but not infinity symbols, never infinity symbols because they were too human. Human. The word reserved for all the others, the ones who chewed with their mouths open, only saw as far as their vision would allow them, knew nothing but the instincts their bodies told them. But those people never needed to breathe through a straw, didn’t have to sleep with a snake in the next bed over and those people never looked at an ocean and wished they were on the bottom of it. So she thought about those people, and the past year, her vision that would never fail her, and the hole from the straw, and so she knew. It was time for a change. Time to take the humanity off the shelf, look at it everyday, keep it in her pocket and touch it when she needed a reminder that she was small. Not small in the bad way, but small enough to know that the hands on her windpipe could never have been as big as they once seemed, that she could fit between the couch cushions, slip through a crack if she needed an escape, could be the missing corner piece of the puzzle, maybe even someone else’s puzzle, could stand next to anyone and whisper “you’re small too, isn’t it beautiful?”

I was sitting in the basement, thinking about stealing one of my mother’s cigarettes, watching the credits roll over all the concrete surfaces laughing with myself about nothing, finally feeling like something, a little small, a little human, but not so bad in the end.