Fell Happy

-bits from the work

"It's not until a year later, upon asking the mirror what people believe about her, that she finally remembers that this mark below her right eye, a beauty mark's runaway, twisted cousin, is imprinted from when she smoked in bed with someone of equal phoniness. They both subscribed to monthly shipments of sacred ingenuity. Both caricatures of human beings, pigmented in a pearly, starved guilt that could no longer go unnoticed. Those nights, half-fated and full of rum-dipped feelings, we discovered could never be enough. We tried to save them, tried to tame and cottage their lies into a secret cobwebbed countryside more beautiful than real.

Now we know.

We must unknowingly press through them, first, and then turn and grieve- not for the disturbance- but for the gossamer's substance at all. We tried over and under again; the kind of rib-removing act reserved for children married to their balloons. Tried, yet our paper-mached strips ached and peeled for unprotected eulogies, for bullshit leap-frogging off of the mundane, for Molotov cocktails, for anything that turned our heads with talk of the road. The strips, still wet, self-destructed into monochromatic globs that spit final, Styx-diving words into our faces instead of tombs.

And that is how it really happened. We've been lying to each other all these weak years.

That convivial burn syncopated itself into her life's melodic wonderings: gambling drunk revolutions around the sun, who kept quiet, before tucking it in under calculated blankets of discretion at the end of . She hid it from us all. It took us years to catch the poison, finally stealing happenstance when the world wasn't looking. But it still ruined us completely, having already convinced our shaky dispositions the branding had maybe always been there; never knowing, never happy.

But that was only the first of many memory waves our virulent subconsciouses groomed to our perfection.

Never the last."