A Letter From Mid-June

At first the world will explode like an overripe orange, the juice staining your fingers pink, leaving you with a dark pit in the seed of your stomach, where a piercing metal rod drilled splinters into your rotting liver. You’ll wonder what the meaning of love really is, if not the warmth that pierces through your bones in the coldest of days or the wet kisses on your forehead when your body has been drained of its fluid.

You’ll breathe so quickly you’ll lose your ability to do so. Your hands will shake. Your mind will shatter on the carpet, staining it green. 

Something akin to rubber might even twist into a ribbon around your neck, squeezing it tighter, digging a noose of potential wasted away purely by choice. You’ll question your purpose in life, as all lost teenagers often do. Plans that will shatter near the tips of your fingers and stab into your skin like cactus hair, exotic and life threatening and all so very unreal. 

You might think you’ve fallen ill, and others will believe you have. Your skin will shrivel away across your chest, flakes tumbling onto well-worn loafers doused in toxic glitter, becoming the dust in the crevices of old books and friendship bracelets. 

All eyes will be pressed against your half-opened full-body organs, your lungs, your liver and that little bead of a heart nestled under the wing of a headless pigeon. Vomit stains the bedsheets and stray hairs collecting at the bottom of the wastepaper basket and I’m festering on the ground in a mess of bare limbs and something is digging into the crook of my neck and oh god can anybody see me? 

Would it matter if they did?

Is my skin going to bleed from the force of their sharp gazes, until I’m left as nothing but a saggy collection of leftover bones and muscles? Will my frostbitten fingers ever radiate the warmth they now crave? 

We accept and reject and press injections into gums so it numbs the pain of the needle. You will remain stuck in a staticy TV broadcast with the sounds of the narrator drilling slabs of the wooden stage on your body and misplacing the nails somewhere in your luscious locks.

Tell me, oh wise one, is it always going to be so loud? 

Someday, I promise you, it will get quieter.