She felt a fire burn slick inside her mind. The wine, a decimal too dry for her taste. And the air, too brisk against her uncovered skin. It had been all day spent on her feet and not an hour later, she found herself draped across a city bench, struggling to grasp another beat of her heart. She clicked her tongue, drawing it over her four front teeth and hummed as she drained the last awful drop of her wine. A song of sweet and wine citrusy sorrows spilling into the world.
The corner store offered a decent selection of reds and whites and roses. The cabs always a magnet for her after work cravings, satiating all needs and granting her mind a minute to breathe. So normally, she’d hand over a ten, a five and four ones to the clerk. She’d borrow his opener, grip the glass bottle by its neck and swig from it not a second after she exited. Then, she would deliberately walk forty four steps, lit by a mustard colored glow of city lights until she’d melt away on a city bench. And before turning to a drunken mess, she’d reach to the bottom of shrubbery on her right and pull out a dusted wine glass to drench herself in thought.
Though tonight was different on all levels. Her feet cried out louder, screams. Her shoulders ached with sharp hunching pains and her stomach caved in from a lack of nutritional support. Not a minute after nine p.m, she barely barreled it outside her storefront doors before tears streamed like icy rivers down her flushed cheeks. Their force felt heavier, deeper– coming from the darkest parts of her, pouring from a blackness woven by the threads of emptiness at the hands carrying loneliness.
She had run, run down the sidewalks and into the streets where cold breaths of air sliced at her lungs. Tearing them apart and apart. Deeper and further until their breakage. The screaming of her muscles and the cracks of her bones didn’t just stem from exhaustion. The tears peeling like dying petals from her eyes weren’t just sorrowful. And the utter horror of her thoughts weren’t just the loose threads of a blanket woven from loneliness. No. Tonight was different on all levels.
The white corner store lights rained down upon her breaking state. Stripping back the last layers of sanity and laying out her insanity like black ink on a white page. Her vision was tainted by the constant flow of tears as she distanced herself from the cabs, blindly searching for something to sting. She fumbled along a rack of white bottles with white liquid and bitterly clamped all five fingers along the neck of a heavy, heavy, bottle. Heavy enough to drown her in her own ocean of fear. She then took her last breath of that freezing air as glass fiercely clinked along counter top.
A beep from the machine. “Thirty dollars and eighty-nine cents ma’am.”
Those words barely rang clear as her fingers groped around for loose cash and a couple coins. “All of it. Take all of it.” She blundered, the words and their meaning falling from her lips like social suicide. She wasn’t talking to him as she had said it. She wasn’t talking about the money as some crumpled dollars and loose change now lay in place of the glass bottle.
On her way to the park, the glass bottle didn’t whoosh back and forth. Its liquid contents didn’t move. Her steps were slow, drawing every ounce of strength left within her. And despite the water weight leaving her heart and spilling onto the concrete walked upon, she felt no lighter. Only lesser.
The bench was a cold slab of ice as she sat her bar legs along its bars. And sitting atop them was no better than being caged behind them as she slammed the neck of the bottle onto the freezing metal. Glass shattered in all directions, ricocheting left and right and up and down. Unflinchingly, she fished that dirty wine glass from the bushes, not bothering to blow off the residual specs of dust and poured herself a glass.
The wine, a decimal too dry for her taste. And the air, all too brisk against her uncovered skin. She clicked her tongue, drawing it over her four front teeth and hummed. A murmur of a sweet, sweet sorrowful tune as she pulled the back of her hand across her cheeks, drying the wetness that bloomed. She drained the glass. Drowning in tears and coated in something to light a fire.
From her bag, she swiped a pen and her leather covered notebook, madly flipping through pages of inkly destruction until a blank. And with her teeth, the pen cap lost its grip and came undone.
It’s all I could ever write about. It’s all I have ever been taught to escape. It’s all that suffocates me and yet draws me to take just one more breath. Oh it’s a brutal battle of fairy tales warring against my cut wings.
It was when I was young. It started when I was young. It continued when I grew up. It’s everything I’ve ever learned and nothing I’ve ever hoped. Oh it’s all I could ever dream about and write about and sleep about because it’s the only places it will ever exist.
Oh how it was taught so wrong. Oh how it cannot run in my DNA. How when I was a child my wings were stunted. How when I became old, my wings were cut and chopped and dissected. Oh how to breathe and be alive when my fairytale was wicked.
And so let me tell you about my dreams and those wings I could have had. Let me tell you about the heavenly skies I should’ve flown over. About the stories and the tales that have shown me the most beautiful thing is a weapon. Is hell. And all above, is worthless.
Love.
She bared her teeth and drained a second glass. Black ink coated the edges of her left pinky and white wine coated her. She wept until the pages were warped and her cheeks became soggy. She wept until her eyes were so swollen she couldn’t see words anymore. A mangled and kinked page now rest in her hand where in the other, a lighter. And dripping from her fingers was the wine spilled across ink and flesh and meaningless words. Flame ignited and the sun crested, breaking dawn. Paper swelled and shrunk. Words burned and their meanings with them. The last bit of wine, devoured in the flame. And the warmth that found her next was a new day. The warmth that found her next, drying a dying sorrow, was the burning essence of tainted love. So she hummed a sweet, sweet song of reformation and smiled at the bottle of wine that hadn’t been dranken. Ameliorating love burned bright indeed.