Filling blank space with words
God of Time, if you’re following TheWebWeavers, could you slow down, for me?
Just two minutes ago, three months of summer stretched out hazy and infinite in front of me. Now, it’s ending, it’s over—the happiest summer of my life.
I’m not ready for college to start.
I’m not ready for summer to end.
How am I supposed to let go of my friends? When it feels like I just found them again and I need to cling on for dear life?
At least there’s Instagram.
Photo by KoolShooters from Pexels
You slump down my throat as my taste buds pop with your frigid snakeskin. Shangri La.
Well, not exactly that. You’re an ice-tuned McDonald’s soda, diluted ichor of the gods on this hot as hell day. My solace as the deviled sun blazes onto the field and stilts the freckled dry wheat-grass. My solace as I drive along this lonely road, to escape the fires before me.
“Ah-”, I pant like a dog, “the weatherman wasn’t kidding when he said 115 degrees, huh?”
I’m in a navy pickup, one out of country songs, and today the radio twangs a sour melody. The seats are muggy leather and the steering wheel is a lava stone, my clammy hands upon it. My sweat beads upon my brow and gashes my underarms. Heat sears through the window and threatens to set fire to the carcasses of fast food amassed at the bottom of the car, to send me hurdling into an abyss of crop circles, but to my dismay, it doesn’t happen.
I continue to drive away, hot coals in my throat, as my eyes dart to the empty street behind me. No one is there. Not yet.
I take another sip.
Your delicate plastic orifice is bristled against my thinning mustache. You’ll make it grow again, right? Thick and bushy as it once was?
I drink you more and continue down the long wandering pathway, you occupied in my left hand in a warm bear hug. My fingers oscillate upon your cardboard skin as my wide cuticles divot your golden arches. I sigh in delight.
You are cold. Ice Christ cold. You take me away from the barrel bodies in the trunk, from the raw flesh-acetone scent and their bones that click together, tick tock tick tock. Time ceases when I am with you. When I take another sip.
I swear I’m not crazy. But you know that. I am just a common man, overweight with fried foods and existential thoughts. I swear it.
“Would you like another kiss?” I look behind us again, to make sure no blue clad men are looking in. None.
“I love you.” I confess, “There is a fire in me; the heat of the sun.”
I gulp you down. The liquid stops. You let out a dehydrated croak.
Of course, I crush you under my boot, Just like the rest of them.
Ice cracks. Blood seeps out.
I’ve moved on, I swear I have. Just, it still hurts and I’d like to say this one thing:
On rejection letters
When you unzip your chest and put your soul on display and it’s poured in a beaker like honey and measured and they find it’s not enough, it’s a slap in the face, a slamming of doors. A closing of paths and an erasing of futures.
You’re not good enough.
Maybe it’s a slap well-deserved.
How could you ever think you were good enough?
Maybe it’s a taste, like a dewdrop of pepper juice on your tongue, of the real world. Maybe the encouragement, the belief, the expectation, piled on higher and heavier, were fake and this—this is reality.
I could’ve done more, I could’ve been more, if only I knew I was supposed to. What should have I done? How else should have I molded myself, pressed myself, like the clay I am to your expectation, to the expectation that became mine? (Your expectation that I folded like a love letter and stuck in my chest where it prickeld and prickled until eventually it fused with my heart.)
It was a really competitive application pool this year.
I couldn’t compete.
We had limited space.
There wasn’t space for me.
TheWebWeavers 