Peroxide

When he wears a smile, everybody run!

On a bad day the face in the mirror wears stubble and a top hat. He is daring me to push the limits of my body and the response is complex still. I write ‘no’ in the warm fog my breath makes but I’ve never said the word. My gut is ringed by ceremonial gold and sour in the middle. I’ve always loved a challenge, I’ve always loved to win, no, I’ve always loved to impress. I do a back bend. I push myself against glass. I am abs and endlessness. He is a figment of my imagination that points and laughs until I act that way. I am a figment of his, and he soothes himself with forgetfulness, and that’s forgiveness.

On a webbed day, hot and a few beers in wearing heavy boots, I see myself as tanned and charming. I smoke so much and never wake up sickened. I lust. I lead. I ran away to redacted and I was selfish and it was delicious. Sometimes I meet girls who are avoidant and stare at them like gods, search “how to be toxic” and can’t do it because I can’t shut up, which is step one. Not to brag but I haven’t noticed any wrinkles really that deep forming yet but the other week when I saw a ghost, I wondered if they did. On a webbed day I look in the mirror and feel genuine anger that I’m not 19 still with all the excuses fresh and full and easy with a smile and a “what is she like?”

I still want every person who has ever wronged me to think I’m beautiful. At least let me wear matching underwear in the face of horror. I used to be so put together.

The therapist in my head has no voice but wants to fuck me and so I can’t get any advice. Every solution to every problem is a pose I can hold and then I cry it out when I see the photo.

I wonder if the solution is frozen on his phone and I’d be fine if I watched him press and hold. 20 and alive, like a flashback with narrative weight, a sweet smile and a nice score, maybe, I don’t remember. My chest would swell and shrink, wrapped tight in the black fabric that felt that woven hairs of plastic. I am humming and purring with life, and then everyone would care that I’ve now died.

I say that a lot. Death of the self, death of the soul, over-contemplated. I say I can’t remember 2021 and attribute it to the decomposing period. I came back and then went again. The mirror in winter looks like David Bowie, I emaciated myself trying to match as the spring rose.

It’s summer now. August. I can never think how many years have passed and I have a rule to not let myself count as if it’s bad luck to stretch the cracks between my fingers. I have said the sentence out loud now, and eyes crawled up to me in the dark. They question me on it, asking for specifics and then smiling so toothy and wet, laughing spit bullets. Strikingly normal and definitely evil. I’ve never checked over my shoulder so much for a denim jacket or the devil as when heaven threatens to unfold on some sweet night with him in my bed.

I think a lot about peroxide. The way that urge seems built into every woman to wipe it all in a weird time. Scratch the pigment out and become untracable. The smell of hotel carpets and then my scalp. The blonde girl haunting the narrative, the brunette girl melting into fibre. I want slow motion videos of myself and then maybe I’ll feel real, knowing that when I’m not, really not, it’ll be wistful enough to make them wonder. None of this makes sense.

But then it does when he touches me wrong. Or the tone is blunt and itchy. I spend the night on cold fire. I can’t tell him, I just breathe weird. The music changed, and I know it in the ache in my waist; bruised and tight from simultaneously being instinctually held close, sucked in and tense in safety, and learnedly trying to escape. I wake up and I see me, stubble and a top hat, writing “no” in the glass. The winner is the one that stays quiet. Meanwhile..