Hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks
She stares back at me through my own reflection. Trying to find her way back to the surface, back to the front, back to the center of her being. She eats ginger raw and takes diluted cayenne tincture. Her throat burns but it is a reminder of what it feels like to be in this body. Others at the party have already run off, off to the next thing, the next fix that will keep their moods high and bright and out of the pits of whatever is around, whatever lingers at the corners of doorways and the edges of rooms. Those discarded thoughts and sidelong glances. They run from the noise all the unconsciousness stores up, and all it deposits. One day to be vacuumed up by the next visitor, the next person to call this space home. The stove crackles like a fire, hot like the steam off a sauna. Down in the basement with a broken arm, shoved to the back when the going got too tough, when the awareness was too strong for those just now waking up. She stood there, made this space feel like home, breathed in deeply until her body, her true home found some peace, and then found the back door, which swung open with surprising ease. Outside, all those that had survived, all those who had made it through sat around and balked, waiting for the next steps, surprised yet nonchalant at her reappearance, “yeah we’ve been here, where have you been?” They asked without any real curiosity, only hollowed eyes and sunken cheeks, a circle of them all. Empty, hollow, for it was proclaimed the destruction of what happens when one follows their heart, “so why ever try again?” they asked, and at that she sprung forth. For it is the only way, it is truly the only way. To try and build, to go forth, to create something new after all has seemed to have been lost, after the end of everything, when the party is over and only a few stragglers remain, only a few make it out alive, by the grace of God or something, or something, something unknown yet something innate, a reason none of us seem to know, yet here we are together. Survivors, if that’s what you can even call it. Is waking up when everyone else remains dead a a sign of surviving? Or is it all entirely something else.
If this is all that we have, if we have only each other, then we must go forth from our hearts. We simply must.
I am all of these people and more.
