My brother says, “I’ll call you right back, Krys,” but he doesn’t.
Cloud-colored in the checkout line, I nod to the clerk, spikes in her subtlety as she watches me scan a Covid test, no mask.
Lady, I’m trying my best.
And the thought isn’t lined with defense or defeat, (we say so much more with what we don’t say) just plain pain; almost positive, even, like the piece of plastic now on the floor in the backseat, somewhere, contaminating coffee mugs (chipped, stained at the bottom) and sun-spoiled books, (spine-tapped, overrated) and the speeding citation that ticked my license up a few points. (Through poorly done veneers like it was the end of the world,”Ma’am, you were going 60 in a 35.”)
I am trying my best.
I am maddening, excruciating, impossible to deal with; I am, quite literally, just a woman with a heart who feels things.
“Good morning,” I call out to my neighbor, princess-pretty, unflinchingly morose.
Some flourless response that I catch the end of, “It’s two in the afternoon.”
In love with life, despite.
Sexless, (Drunk, in the mood, with the world as it comes to you, ocean blue,) artless, (making your friends sign dinner receipts for keeps, every part of your apartment covered in color,) minus four grand to your name, (always in airports, spilling into non-paid-time-off to go to Charlotte, Nashville, $400 on the credit card to renew your passport, Mexico,) a little overweight, (my body is beautiful,) a little too dependent on whatever, but not really–not as much as you could be; (watered-down wine in the middle of the night, on the beach just three blocks from my apartment. I used to close my eyes and have dreams just like this: “We’ll park at Krystal’s and walk.”)
Cotton-candy intentions, 80’s-Florida-pink-and-blue and as thin as my patience. It’s purple in my head, purple on the brush, the Frankenstein color of bronchitis, when it actually touches down on something tangible, oxidizes.
Dreams of stay-at-home vacations. Throw the phone into the fucking Atlantic. I don’t need a sign off the interstate to tell me to use caution, or maybe I do, double-crease under my eyes, brown like Autumn leaves dying; like we’re all dying, villains and sinners and antagonistic heartbreak so self-serving, like this summer was; then it wasn’t, and now it’s the rippled wind of a dark November, and it’s back again, oh, it always is, “I’m honestly a little worried about you,” but all anybody does about this is exit stage left, fuck you, and I can’t care about it like I used to, turn the music up.
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