It's a sweltering night, a sweltering morning really, and my body is tattooed with spider bite kisses and bruises. I smell of park grass and chlorine and someone else's sweat, my lips are chapped, swollen, my eyes encircled in crimson undertones. The people on the street stare- I am blonde, a dead give away, slighter and taller than the locals. Men are confused, women are scornful, police are helpless. My legs cramp with the dawn as I walk back to the apartment in my hospital-gown green tunic, sobbing openly, hair tangled with twigs and dirt. It's still dark enough for that, but too quiet. A milkman stops his work to look up at me and whisper ciao in the most kind and gentle voice I have ever heard, especially here, and I want to throw myself into his arms and sleep and scar his white uniform with the black stains of my tears, though I restrain myself and nod, shuffling forward, shoulders slumped, no eye contact, his gaze a hand stroking my back like the father I never had but always wished for, and I cannot help but cry harder, though I try harder to restrict each sob until I sound as though I'm gasping for air, but I would rather seem asthmatic than week, rather be strange than pitiful. It is always better to be unknowable, much more simple than openly vulnerable in my experience, though my experiences are drunken from the bottom dredges of a half empty glass, so truly I do not know if this is true, and and every day I understand Hamlet's letter to Ophelia just a bit more, because every day I doubt truth to be a liar just a bit more.
Still, there are some things I know, enough to be called intelligente by a man named Simone, whose eyes shone with solare during the day, but at night became dark and hungry. I know now why my friend chose to fly off a building in Spain without his wings. There is a disconnection abroad, no sense of security or protection, demons are awakened and restless, dreams colder, and more cruel; the heat drains one's essence, melting the glue that keeps us who are broken together. I know that expectations are sad reflections of desires, shadows of my own inadequacies. I know that I am afraid, that heaven and hell are not places but permanent conditions, that my head is the prison guard of my heart. Blame and guilt come easily. There are no distractions, just meaningless directions, and I seem to have forgotten those I brought from home. Here, I am concerned with physical threats, trauma that can be shaken off with a block's worth of strides, yet I cannot seem to lose my naked shadow between the buildings. I thought I hid it well behind frozen gazes, but the mirrors say, no, no, they know you are all wrong, you foolish girl, you poor little lie, they see through you, they sense your fear and feast upon it, you ignorant child, you are as small as the motes of dust drifting through the beam of a forgotten projector, the film torn and tangled, the screen stuck on one frame
I should have stopped when the milkman spoke. He knows that it is not mirrors who lie, it is us.
short story I wrote about something that happened when I was living in Florence.