Post numero 3, drip drip drip

Word Count 716
JULIE ZEI


Stepping out of the shower, hair still D

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the hard water onto the faded blue of the shower mat on the stained tile floor. Leaning into the mirror to check for every blemish, any sign of non-perfection that may exist leaning in so close you could nearly fall in. The silence is piercing, not even the “plink” noise sneaks out from around the shower curtain you hung only days previous. No one else in your home but you, shadows, and silence. So few things take up such enormous space. It fills every crevice, every crack in the wall, every stain on the tile in the kitchen and bathroom. It fills your ears with it’s screeching. You want to pull it out like a leech off you’re calf when you wade too far into the water but you can’t, it’s attached firmly to your eardrums with a grip much like death. You try to weaken it’s grip by turning on the TV, typing nonsense into a blank word document but nothing can weaken its Spartan hold of you. Aimlessly you wander through your own home, a stranger even to the most familiar of objects. The stacks of DVD’s by the television, you’re precious laptop and the “window to the world” that it holds in it’s pristine white frame. The photos that you hung so carefully on the wall, those snatched moments from your past gleam there, you almost think them mocking you but there they stay as silent as your home.
You fill a glass from the pitcher of water in the fridge, as ice cold as it is it cannot cool the hot nervous sensation you feel your body is radiating, potentially cancerous to those around you. You feel as if you’re just standing still, watching the progress bar of some slow moving program drag that blue line across the screen. Time slows, the walls drip time, wasting it, try as you might to save it you can’t it escapes even your most careful attempts to catch it. Away it slides from you through the shag blue carpet that makes a sea out of your living room. Time slips through the vents in the walls and through the cracks in the walls.
You retreat from such a pointless endeavor, defeated and ashamed, you can’t even salvage the time of day, what else shall you do? Lie down and be idle for the whole day? Will you dream? Will you find yourself flying over the oceans, deserts, and mountains? Will wings sprout from your shoulder blades to carry you away? Or will gills slit your throat and let you dive below the waves; will you swim to the ocean floor and discover something that has never been seen before? What will you do? I for one would just like to lie deathly still and let my eyes take me there, not to dream but to just imagine for a while, test my brain a bit and let new connections be made. Maybe just close my eyes and let them take me to space to the sun and back I don’t really know where I’d like to go, so I’ll just go everywhere.

I feel like I’m loosing juice nothing is coming as easily as it once did, physically and mentally I’m becoming drained. Good ol’ stress has come back again to take its toll on me. I feel encompassed by it, there is no escape from it, worry fill my every pore and every cell of my being, it’s just who I am. I stress and worry about my car, the poor thing, I nearly killed it on the highway just two days ago and she’s not running the way she used to anymore. I worry about my grades, about what I’m going to eat for dinner; will I have the money to buy dinner? What about pay for rent, and school? School is nowhere near affordable for any 20 year old no matter where they go. Will my dad keep his job and his good health and be able to provide for my family back home? All of these things define who I am and what I do. I am not, nor will I ever be, worry free.

JULIE ZEI