Category: Fictional Musings

– And there’s an embrace, as if meaning were translated into simple action. An embrace, as if it could make amends for all wrongs perpetrated. A silly thought, but also a common one. So there’s the embrace and arms wrap themselves around the other. There’s a warmth and it can hide truth, it can hide clarity and pretend sincerity. A layering of kisses follows, one after the other, like pecks meant to undo the hurt that translates itself into the dried salt that remains after. The problem is, with each collision of lips, instead of peeling away the scar’s covered […]

– The gentle breeze of the spring morning nudges against the blinds. They vibrate, a staccato rhythm in the dim light breaking over the horizon. I wake, the temperature of mist frozen on my body. There’s blood on the pillow, the one propped under my upper torso. My heart is torn and my eyes strained. Breath makes me quiver with my own staccato rhythm. It has been said love and pain are the same emotion. The difference, the magnitude. This explains why, when you love someone an impossible amount, and you hold them close, there’s a wailing in the heart […]

– “If I loved you,” she says, “if I did, would it matter?” Her expression pained, her eyes growing red, the strain multiplying and spreading; first around the tiny iris, like red felt tip tracing an outline, and then turning the white a salmon pink. Her lips contort as she speaks, as she holds back emotion, as she holds back truth. It’s the bulging, it’s the emotion attempting to escape; bulging at the closure of her lips. It is like the shivering of the iron door as you try to keep out the storm. She looks away. That same jagged […]

-You woke to a chilled room, the scent of moisture filling the empty space. At some point during your slumber, the warmth had returned underneath the cover and filled in the space between it and you. You could feel a frost on your nose and as you wrinkled it you could feel the harsh crease on it. Laying there, you were pulled by the warmth and painfully aware of the cold. You lay there debating which you should focus on, which call to heed. In the midst of your debate, the darkness of night was allayed by the sun, as […]

-Your mind raced, you quivered under the blanket, its previous warmth stolen. You left the upturned lamp in the corner on, its light falling off on its trek across the room. Your eyes blurred as they lost their focus. The thoughts swirled inside of you. Had anyone been with you in that moment, they might have caught glimpses in the sparse reflection of light on the surface of your pupils. You’ve always hated when things get ruined and here was further proof that the trail of your existence was littered with ruination. It wasn’t at that point even noticeable, the […]

-The door opened with a swoosh, the wind was blowing outside. It had picked up from last you had noticed it. Even before you took a step out of the coffee shop, standing there at the doorframe, the wind howling in front of you, you could feel it begin to deplete that built up warmth. It seeped out quickly. You hurried through the puddles and sleeked concrete to your bike. As your hands reached out and grasped the handlebars, you could already feel the biting cold of the breeze. The dampened sweatshirt, its flooded crest, became like an ice pack, […]

-“Where am I?” The question came to you as you stepped past the bathroom’s heavy door. Following it, you laughed at yourself. A silly question it was. It wasn’t a matter of displacement, but of clarity. As you had entered everything had been nothing more than a blur. Now, after staring at yourself and blinking your way to focus, retinal focus, you could see the small coffee shop clearly. Admittedly, it did not seem familiar, being a place you seldom visited, but had enough familiarity for you to recognize it. You glanced around once more, taking in the facade, the […]

-In the coffee shop, the on-campus coffee shop, not the one where you’d meet your friends to hold study sessions, but the one you seldom visited because it was usually overcrowded, you immediately felt the shift in temperature. Now it felt like your skin was thawing at a radioactive frequency. And in that second, as the door was yet to shut behind you-the two of you-you closed your eyes and wondered if this was what food felt in the microwave. The thought was drowned in the sound of water falling. You honed in on it and realized it was not […]

-It kept you warm that winter when you purchased it. It fit snuggly; yet loose enough to be the most comfortable article in your entire wardrobe. It was only the rain, which led successful campaigns against the cotton and wool fibers and concatenation of frays that wrapped themselves around your frame, from the soft bundle of the hood-folded, a make shift pillow at the back of your neck-to the tapered end hanging half way down your bottom, an inch from reaching the V from where your pants’ legs grew. It was the rain that proved the sweatshirt was not in […]

-The image that comes to mind is that of thread. Not thread wound into something sizeable, a bundle of weak frays, but rather thread in its abundant weakness, the thread that frays. The fray that tugs at the armor of a sweatshirt slowly convincing other threads, knit tightly, to give into their weak constitution. A chain of frays that become the slow unraveling and eventual demise of that sweatshirt, the one you wore on those occasions when you felt you needed a little something, some kind of reminder, perhaps of an accomplishment, perhaps of your value, that little emblem, that […]