Bowling ball

I had been observing her my entire life, and a shadow of incompleteness sometimes hovered behind her. A dense shadow, three dimensional, thickening around a core of mystery. The mystery vanished when she mentioned casually a dream she had abandoned decades ago, pretending it meant nothing even as it dropped through the conversation like a bowling ball through old floorboards, letting loose a shaft of light. I could see something I hadn't before.

NORTH STAR

The story had lost everyone's interest a couple of sentences ago, so I glanced at a woman standing against a street sign outside. She was watching me intently through the glass. When I met her gaze, she waved to me by holding up her left hand and letting her long fingers collapse down into their palm. The mocking pout she affixed to her face convinced me to noiselessly stand up, leave the table, and walk outside.

Her Persian blood made itself evident in her nose and her skin and her hair; but her tongue and her hands were American. She spoke nervously of seeing me look bored among my friends and told a story about a time she wished she'd been saved. All the while, she clutched her phone in her right hand. Even when she used sharp or elaborate gestures to aid her speech, it waved along.

Last night

Last night your hands were in my hair. I don't know where the rest of you was, or the rest of me. But my head was in your hands, my hair around your wrists, your knuckles pressing into my scalp, the pads of your little fingers leading the way.

MOURNING HEART

It's four in the morning and I'm reading about defibrillators. "Defibrillation is a treatment for life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmias." She's downstairs with her phone off—been asleep for hours, I'm sure. A break from the glowing screen to the admirable consistency of her flawed handwriting in a Valentine card on my nightstand calms me.

Now I'm reading about circadian rhythms. "A circadian rhythm is a roughly 24 hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings." Before I even wake up, she'll have ridden to work, showered, readied herself, smiling with the anticipation of helping the world move forward a bit.

I search "siw," expecting pictures of Self-Inflicted Wounds.  It surprises me to see the abbreviation now stands for Strong Independent Woman, so I search "mixing diphenhydramine alcohol."

Vertigo

I want to forget and forgive at the same time, like wanting amnesia and nostalgia all at once.

GUTTERBOUND

Bowling ball by the side of the street. Whose patterned green fluorescence is gutterbound tonight?

Shit or piss

The government has decreed that no person may shit or piss outside of the toilets they are yet to build, so the people sit, squatting, by the roadside, to be picked up or struck down, waiting for relief.