#glitter_brawl

My pose is reminiscent of languor.  The sun stings my cheeks.  I recline, and gaze deeply, longingly, into the single eye that looms over me; nestled in its black hood of petals.  Another click; it winks, lazily. 

“Think I’ve almost got it” 

I exhale.  Your quest for perfection is unrelenting - desperate to trap the moment, to drink it in, over and over: the heat of the afternoon sun, the sound of the swifts, the smell of dried grass and the faint taste of salt on my parched lips.   

You’ll capture an echo of the truth; wanton and sunburnt.  Put down the camera.  Live it.

The room looks expectantly to me for comment.  There is a suffocating silence.  I fill it, calmly.  The rehearsed lines catch in my throat.   They don’t seem to notice.

I look down.  The knee-high lace socks; giant stilettos sit clumsily, an inch away from my feet.  These sleeves are too long for my chubby arms.  I've a pink plastic ring on the fourth finger of my left hand.  In the window, I catch the smear of garish lipstick on my cheek, mingling with something else: jam, probably.  I've left sticky little fingerprints all over “my” paperwork.

I spin on my too-big heels and stumble out.  Fooled them again. 

I couldn't tell you what I ate that morning. I could barely open my mouth, let alone chew and swallow. I remember the smoothie, though. A lurid purple; condensation ran down the side of the glass, pooling around the base. Maroon flecks speckled the surface. I swirled the straw, they disappeared into the pulpy vortex. I heard some of what he said.  Regret. Beautiful. Apologies. It could've been anything, really. The raspberry seeds were mesmerising. Notes slid towards me across the crumb-strewn table. "To...ah...help you to get home". I was suddenly acutely aware of my worth. He stood, leant forward, inhaled the scent of my neck ("for later," he told me) and left. I stared down at the meagre pile, the damp circles and blackened crumbs. This was an unexpected transaction. I've never really been one for breakfast.

They always start off like you, with lofty aims; "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". Let me tell you, sunshine, all you get from lying with your head back around here is shit in your hair. Glance up, certainly, but don't lie back and gawp. We all learn that pretty early on. The trick to the gutter is to look sideways. Look downwards. The iridescent sheen of oil has a magic of its own; the light bounces off the fragments of windscreen like they're diamonds. Stars are for the lazy dreamers. You're better than that. 

There's a little dip there; a shadow. Just next to your clavicle, a little undulation of the flesh: I can't keep my eyes off it. I want, desperately, to touch it. To gently, silently, run a single finger along the bone and watch you tremble. More than this, I want to bury my head in that cavern. I want to inhale you: the scent layered under the synthetic fumes, the very human essence of You. To open my mouth, just slightly, and taste you. To hear you breathe. I wish this were a simpler sort of lust, but I want to own you with all of my senses. 

I search for it intently. Stupid, childish habits die hard. There it is. A single letter which surely means I'm still loved; that whatever I've said or done this time has been absolved. There, in pixels, is my forgiveness: x I look harder. This isn't right. It's floating in mid air. There's no punctuation, it's not capitalised; what does that mean? Was that intentional? Some "x" that he's in the habit of? Who else has received these haphazard, meaningless xs? Is it really a kiss, though? Does x mark the spot where the treasure lies buried, or is it the centre of the sniper's target? How am I supposed to read that? Backstory: in my Portuguese friend's wedding card, I'd added a couple of Xs after my name. Her mother was part horrified, part curious: this is, apparently, an English-speaking trait; the Portuguese simply put the whole word "beijos", which eliminates a lot of the mystery around Xs