Thursday, December 10, 2009

After the Header

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)


She didn't love her mother enough. She didn't love her boyfriend enough. She hated her job, and then she lost it. She drank. She bitched. She ate shit. She didn't give a shit. She fucked off. She fucked too much. She didn't fuck enough. She considered her life to be an elaborate form of et cetera. Once, when she was eighteen, she accepted two hundred dollars from a lawyer to dance at a party he was throwing at his office. Fat men slapped her ass. They had a great time. She spent the two hundred dollars on clothes at Target. She looked nice on her first day of class at the community college.

A couple of weeks ago, she started looking people in the eye, really looking. She could see a black, empty spot in the middle of everybody. With an actual person, this black spot was one thing, fleeting, as if in the split second a person's eyes were leveled into hers she had final proof that the light of the mind is a lie, then the eyes would look away, and she wouldn't be certain what she had seen was true. In a photograph of a person, this black spot was too much to bear. The eyes never wavered from hers. She would go on her computer and look at pictures of her friends, her mother, her boyfriend, herself, and would zoom in on their pupils. No matter how she adjusted the resolution, the eyes were the same. They had nothing behind them. They would never see who she was, deep down. Nobody knew her. She didn't know herself.

Before she jumped, she stared at the sun and tried to blind herself with the light of world. She failed at this. On the way down, she saw sunspots in the concrete and wondered, at the last instant, if she had misinterpreted the signs.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, my old friend Lori was the same way. Bipolar. Stopped taking her meds. Jumped from the 30th floor of a pseudo-luxury hotel in Tulsa on her 30th birthday. I'm the only guy who never fucked her, I think.

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