Elephants

The water is grey this early, a calm unbroken expanse of shades. Breath puffing white on the cool air, she huddled deeper into the wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the red of her car the only color in a monotone world. In the poor light she can almost imagine monsters swirling in the deep, peering out where sea met sky and smiling, harmless with sharp teeth and gaping mouths. Were they there to swallow her dreams?

But maybe it’s just the alcohol still humming in her veins, warming her blood and dulling the chill seeping through wool socks and worn jeans. Another year gone. A good year. A fantastic year. And yet the melancholy slips in regardless, like the devil with his pretty lies, whispering half truths and twisted reality. Not good enough, didn’t try hard enough.

They were oddly easy to believe in under the half light where night meets dawn meets day. She’s there alone, has been all night, with only a thermos of coffee spiced with alcohol to keep her company. No one else wanted to venture out to meet the New Year with runny noses and dreams of deserving. She smiles wryly at the thought, running fingers through chilled hair, slicking it back, giant worries and scintillating dreams lumbering through her skull, loud like elephants in her ears, stomping and trumpeting everything she hadn't completed to the world.

Ridiculous thoughts in a tired addled mind.

Crunch, tires on gravel distract her from lonely gloom, so unlike her usual chipper self, before the slam of doors, one two, reach her ears and voices drift through the inky sky. “How do you even know she's going to be here?” she knows the voice and hearing it is enough to make lips twitch.

“Its New Year's morning, where the he else would she be,” She knows that voice too, this one even better. After all, she is intimately knowledgeable about the curve of pierced flesh the words tumble out of. Sitting still, she feels the sorrow tugging on her heart slowly start to slip. Either she was that predictable or just known that well, either way its comforting to hear.

Seconds tick-tock, matching heavy steps on stone and sand until the voices drift closer and he can hear the words, smug and haughty, “See, I told you.”

“Whatever.”

“Shove over punk,” a hand presses against her thigh, ringed and warm and she obediently shifts to the side, making room for her two guests on the hood of her car. “We’ve come to ruin the pity party,” Warm lips meet her cold ones in a kiss, tracings of a tongue, and the rest of the heaviness in her bones seems to float away.

A snort of semi-disgust reaches his ear and she grins, “I don’t think we have approval.”

“He,” the lips mumble against hers, “is just jealous.”

“I’m right here, and you never mentioned trading spit in your list of things to do when we found her,” the words were dry with only a hint of chastisement coloring the consonants and vowels.

Laughing, the other pulled away and made himself comfortable, just as the first streaks of gold tipped over the horizon. “What are you so afraid of? You won’t get cooties and whatever happened to ‘Whatever I want’?”

“It’s whatever I want, not you,” the retort was made through chapped lips and the car dipped even lower with added weight. “It’s bloody freezing out here.”

With a smile, tugging at her mouth and worming its way into her heart, she handed her thermos over. “Drink this,” she urged as an arm snuck around her waist and she let her head fall against a soft shoulder. Her regrets were sifting from her skull to tumble with the rocks on the shore, getting washed away in the light of friendship, lovers, and dawn.

Suddenly it didn’t feel so dark, the past so dreary. The year ahead was bright gold and the elephants, loud and obnoxious in her ears, could shut up.


A/N: Anyone have any regrets from the old year as we approach the new one?

Reptiles

I've come to realize Starbucks is one of the best places to write for me. Lack of distractions, yummy drinks and music through my headphones. I haven't been feeling too well lately (I had strep throat and all the goodness and fever that comes with it) so some nights, instead of going to jiu jitsu with Mike, he would drop me off at the Starbucks near the Studio and I would simply write write write.

Then there comes the realization that a lot of the things I write are dark. Dark themes that most people would rather shy away from, but for some reason they like to stick in my head and upset me until I get them down on paper. But then they sit there, and sometimes I like how they are written, despite the content, and I want to share them, and get opinions, but I am too afraid of people's reactions.

That said I am going to post a piece of something that I wrote over the last week. It contains some rather disturbing imagery so if there are those of you out there who don't want to read what your daughter/sister/friend has going on in her mind some days and be disturbed... stop reading now :)

Inspired by the lyrics of this song.

Cold. It was cold, breath whispering fog in the early mornings before light hit broken glass, bouncing red, blue and gold through steam, a miasma of beauty. It reminded her of butterflies, flitting carelessly through the air, stamped on skin and shimmering with sweat.

Shivering, she pulls naked knees closer, scraped and bruised with misuse, and tries to focus past the cool bars of the cage pressing into her shoulders. She has a name, she knows she does; or she had, before everything was stripped away and the needles made the world blur. Antibiotics, medication, words so often whispered in her ear as countless syringes perforate her veins, the air growing hot, thick and laboured, skin shrinking and so sensitive to the touches sliding along thighs. It’s not medicine, she knows that much, even as her spine contorts and heat wracks her frame, arching for more.

Once, when she was less caught in the never ending circle of pain punctuated cruelly with pleasure, she tried to escape. Now, whispered praises are like the poison inserted into her arms, noxious and oh so addicting. She learned her lesson well, the bite of a whip curling and snapping against her spine teaching her the consequences of her actions. She listens.

There are no more questions. There were at one point, and she remembers them mattering, recalled that sealing her lips was important. She doesn’t know why anymore but it doesn’t matter, she can’t dredge up the answers anyway. But she misses the queries, they kept her more alert, gave her a semblance of schedule. Now it was just dawn, coloured grime and black iron walls, midnights where scars flashed moonlight jewelry and a studded tongue flicks the white contours in memory. Everything else is just in between, hot or cold, misty.

Footsteps, hollow and loud, trudge closer and through bleary eyes she sees him. She can always evoke his name, it's burned into her flesh, imprinted on her mind. It’s the one she calls out, twisted nightmares and scintillating dreams mingling with reality as the world comes unhinged.

Afterward she's left alone. Always alone. Curling in on herself she stares as the shafts of light, no longer colors. Instead they fall unheeded through the cracks, sparkling on dust. She wants to touch them, but every time she’s tried they simply swirl away, dancing on bright feet, hiding a lingering warmth.

I guess the title only makes sense if you read the song title and the lyrics. There is a lot more to this, and I swear it ends on a hopeful good note... but I needed to get it off my chest and write it. Which is probably evidenced in the way its nearly 6000 worlds long in its entirety and I wrote it in less than 48 hours.

Anyway, try not to judge me too harshly. I am trying to be brave here and show some of my work that I know not everyone will look at with approval.

And that is all...