She walks down the hallway with dark-tinted sunglasses but it’s 9 pm and she’s late for her night class. You know this because you're in the same class and you’re also late but the difference is your knees keep kissing the floor from trying to run with your soaked shoes stomping on the quiet hall of your school. Her back is facing you but you can almost make out her side-view. You see a cigarette dangling on her lips. She exhales and drops the stick on the floor, her boots making contact with the ashes to disintegrate it further. She finally turns around and you stare at her wondering how someone could be so calm and collected. She took off her glasses and stared at you, shaking her hair to rid the little droplets of rain that made a home in the black silky strings attached to her scalp. Your palms sweat and you grow confused. You see nothing in the orbs reaching a hand out to yours and suddenly you’re catapulted back to the now and you’re staring at a reflection of yourself in the girl’s bathroom after making an excuse to your professor about how you’re feeling sick but really, you’re sick of the sharp nails scraping the board doing nothing to teach you algebra or...what class were you taking? You can’t stay there. You feel like your skull is about to break. The bag under your eyes feel heavy and they’re screaming at you that they can’t carry your eyes any longer. You ignore them. Because your chest is saying the same thing about your heart. You wonder how you got to the point where your brain stopped sending out your conscience to tell you that ***** is not gonna wipe out your memory and that blades were meant to tear other things, not your skin. Where your angel and your devil fall off your shoulder from trying to shake off all your feelings and they stopped trying to get back up there and whisper to your ear. The devil wins anyway. And he knows it. You know it. (So why did you let it happen?) You stare at the mirror carefully and regard the girl with the pale skin, empty vortex in the shape of eyes and try to reach out your hands inside to see if you can uncover something but you notice your fingers disappearing in front of you and you can’t feel your arms. In fact, you can’t feel the rest of your body. You are simply a husk of man, now. An apparition that looked like the girl after self-destruction that one night which led to an unbreakable habit. The Future aches for the Present to switch places because it knows more a lot about what's going to happen but you also know that your mistakes are gonna catch up with you sooner or later so you stand back and watch the Present detonate on the bathroom floor.
The tiles are cold and you feel your limbs going weaker. The walls are closing in on you and you wonder if they came to keep you company. You want some company.  Your eyelids is falling asleep and the last you see is a closed door. You liked that door. It didn't give way to strangers tonight. You try to listen to your heartbeat but the silence is screaming too loud. You plead for it to go away but it stays. And you stay. Laying on the bathroom floor, you stayed. Everyone else resumed what they were doing and you stayed on the bathroom floor. You stayed.

m.j.