Reflecting on Recent Events

Driving in the car with the soft golden sun beating down on my forehead through the glossy car window, I stare up at the pale blue sky overhead, squinting my eyes until they're almost shut.

I am laughing, I am laughing, I am laughing so hard until my stomach aches and tears are rolling out of the mascara-stricken corners of my eyes and down my hollowed cheeks.

No one says anything. Not a word slips out and I just laugh, because I find it so funny that the sun still has the courage to shine when half the world is dying either from fear or fortune, virus or vice.

I am sitting here now writing this, typing this, fingers clacking away on the keyboard like the ticking of the clock, constant and continuous. A violin plays somberly off in the distance, a forgotten chord echoing throughout the now-ghosttown of Schroeder Hall and Sendiks and the second floor of Memorial and seventeenth and state streets.

It doesn't feel real. It doesn't feel real. It is real. It is real.

Time flies like wind some days, catching my hair and whipping violently across my eyelashes as it turns my lips into snakeskin and the skin just below my eyebrows into all shades of red and pink. Other days it is staring aimlessly at the sky. Laying on my bed. Waiting for the familiar, almost comforting hum of a car outside.

It is fine.

The soap sticks stubbornly to the thinness of my wrist, cold water staining it all shades of blue and green and purple as veins become visible. I do not care.

I let the faucet run. I do what is necessary.

This, too, shall pass.