parkagirl
A lack of inspiration is what keeps me grounded. My feet, firmly planted on the dirt of such a comprehensible world, are testament to my static life. One day it'll sprinkle rain and I'll breathe, realize, charge.
Uncivilized. Neanderthal. Inhuman. You don't belong here--here being society, civilization, the world of people the color of ebony and toilet seats. These words, once thrown in the air, are permanent, and what they leave behind is incredible. It is a sort of stink that never fades away. The stench is like something that has rotted at the bottom of a fetid puddle of steamy, diseased rainwater for too many months, something that would be alarmingly sweet and sour if you were to put it in your mouth--like really old feta cheese, she imagines--which makes her wonder how a human body could produce such matter, such trash, how someone could spit that out with a human mouth and taint someone else instead of himself. She comes to the conclusion that hate is a magical thing, this strange thing that, first and foremost, rots the hater's insides--but you would never know, because the most obvious harm is done to the hated. Hate. When he throws it at her, it lands on her skin, on the sides of her arm, her shirt, a little bit on her hair, as fragrant as throw-up and as toxic as industrial bleach. She feels the sting for long afterward and knows it will leave a scar. She feels like a hunted ape with an almost fatal bullet in its backside and hates herself for it.
In reality, he had bought the ring at a Kay's long ago, in a different time, when summer was in full swing but the only heat he felt was the kind deep in his veins, the kind that surged violently, ridiculously, at every mention of his lover at the time. He hadn't known then, that that heat would disappear with the heady air and the brilliant sun of a July in Chicago; that it would frost over and disappear.
He had learned, and although he was smart, he was stubborn. The heat had returned, and he refused to recall his lesson; he brought it out from its dark hiding place in the most obsolete corner of his closet, and thought of her only briefly before he remembered to go forward with the present.
She saw his humanity when she saw the yellow stains on his collar. He was tired. Even if he was cruel to the core, he was only another animal in a dog-eat-dog world. He was not at fault for his evil
The blankets were shaped in the form of a crime scene, as though only moments before had they been abandoned by a lover as passionate as he was insane. Red from the bone-white beauty of what peeked out innocently underneath her raven locks dripped like goo, looking almost comically fake, and it was everywhere. Life was a cartoon then. A still-life cartoon.
Fresh red throbbing
How could anyone relate
All he could say was that everything had been done under the veil of apathy and detachedness
Detached
That's what he was
Everything came to a still. The mark was so cold; so, so cold it burned, and she saw it eat her shirt and then, for a nanosecond, come to a standstill before her flesh, as though hesitant about whether or not it should--could it? would it? It would, and it did; it bit her, sunk her teeth into her, slapped her warmly and silently into an obedient quiet.
She looked up; he stared; an unreasonable anger made him believe that this was okay.
She fainted.
Pressed for a deadline, backed up against the wall, breathing hard with nowhere to turn, nowhere to go. She cried alone in the office after hours, sometimes, and once she took her break to smoke out in the back, even though she had promised herself she would never pick up a Marlboro ever again. She looked in the mirror and felt terrible, awful, disgusting, inhuman; she missed the person she had always been, the self she had sold in exchange for a career.
She couldn't believe his nerve, how he could be so bold, so utterly selfish and so shameless about his motives. She watched the ice cubes in his tea clink together as he stirred them with a spoon, and she wanted to kill him.
Suddenly they looked up. It was initially a speck in the sky. Closer, closer; it was a plane, it was coming too close, its nose faced the cheek of the Twin Tower across the street from the cafe where they sat.
At the last minute, the plane became a bird, and the bird collapsed. In the second before the bird lost its consciousness and it kissed the buildings, as it hovered in the reflection they watched, she looked across the table at him, and saw only his fear.
And everything that had been bottled up until that moment came forth like the village flood last spring, when lukewarm water, full of dirt and dead flies, washed over houses and farms carelessly, recklessly. What Juli remembered the most about those few weeks was finding wet insect carcasses everywhere--in her coffeepot, on the spines of the books she managed to salvage from the wreck, in all of her clothes, even inside her mattress.
Juli stared at him, this insignificant boy. Suddenly his eyes began to grow; his arms appeared smaller, smaller, smaller; his head was huge, he was sprouting paper-thin wings.
Juli was disgusted.
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writing since 2010 · 24 entries · 24 days shown up
each square is a day—lit means Parka showed up.
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the words Parka reaches for
eyesanotherpeppernosefaceredwordsthousandstaredwatchedlipsrememberedherselfdifferentcolddone