“Come on in, the water is beautiful.”
And when you finally look in the mirror (Cause where else are you going to look?) your skull is cracked on the left side (actually it would be your right), your eyes are filled with ash, and your skin has been cycling through the laundry for years and years. All this because you stayed home one too many times watching “One Piece,” with a joint and a bottle, but the orange kind, playing a video game on the floor leaning against the couch?
Spin me one…two…and three more times. Smiles and Vomit all over the floor.
But you’re confused and you’re having an honest moment with yourself, alone, in the bathroom of the Panera Bread across the street from the movie theater where you were first ever broken up with, and you cried the whole car ride home, and broke your hand and the latch on the center compartment of your mom’s black Toyota Camry all in one hormone-fueled punch, so you decide to push together some sort of self-reclamation plan (effective immediately) designed to make you Mike Simmons, one of your best friends in middle school, and not the brains-blowed-out freakshow that is trapped behind the water stains above a not all that dirty sink.
Smooth feet lift from the tide and golden robes blow in the ocean wind. OPEN YOUR THIRD EYE AND SEE WHAT THEY CANNOT.
So you frantically skitter outside and follow the bloody trail leading onto cracked pavement. You’re really running now. God, how long has it been? 16? No you were 15 you piece of shit. And now you’re moving faster than you have EVER run, which isn’t really all that fast, but for you it may as well be world record speeds. What happens when you trip and fall?
KISS THE FUCKING STARS.
And you are going so fast you feel like your legs are going to rip apart at your groin and your knees are going to give out. The trail that has been guiding you has thinned, and you’re looking from red drop to red drop. The distance between them goes further and further apart until you cannot find the next one.
“Blow your goddamn brains out, kid.”
What now? Well you look up. You thought they wouldn’t understand, but they do! They have been watching you for a long time, after all. And they’re so funny! Everything looks different. You washed your eyes out and pushed them back into your face. Your head is stitched together, you can still see the bald spot, but you figure it will go away with time. And it does.
A sweat-soaked shirt and sneakers with holes, but damn those dogs are fast.
Mike Simmons? How does he do it? He’s like your freaking sister. What does he do when he gets home? What does he do when he’s at work? What does he do when he wakes up? What does he do when he’s walking to his car, or waiting to be seated in the small sitting area at the front of a restaurant, or listening to a friend of a friend complaining about their landlord? No no no no no. You’re fixed all wrong. And now you can’t even see what they did to you. One hair turns to five which turns to twenty. You can feel the scars with your white tipped fingernails, and you bury them into your healed wound. You’re making record progress.
“What happened to my head?”