A Penny For Your Books

As I am currently in a writing slump, I wanted to try and be more descriptive in my writing. We are reading a sensation novel in class and the writing is pictorial and beautiful. While I am fully aware that I can’t write in the same eloquence as a Victorian novel, it’s fun to try to emulate it in a more modern way. The piece ended up migrating a bit from what I intended, but when does writing not?

The longer I stare, the further my consciousness is dispelled from the immense disappointment of my personal reality as it has come to pass. As my vision becomes hazier, the lines of physical personhood dissipate alongside the universal understanding of how the world is supposed to function. I watch my skin become liquid, my freckles become chasms, and my hair metamorphose into another, equally as absolute, version of myself. 

She lives on my head. Despite her clear development into personhood, she is resolute in her promise to remain with me, until time naturally releases her from her containment through our collective follicles. I feel her watching me. I attempt to maintain our amiable eye contact, but I cannot comprehend the impact of time on her existence. In the same moment that she is created, her life flashes across my eyes, images dipped into the shallow pool of my swirling corneas. She stands, fastened to my skull for an entire lifetime before she wrinkles, becomes ashy, then white, and I unwillingly watch with forlorn horror as muscle and bone alike disintegrate, her promised freedom resulting in complete and utter expiration. My hair returns to its former position down my back. Each strand tugs at the base of my skull in protestation, and I know she is still there, perpetually trapped and unable to exercise her promised freedom. I wonder if she is in pain. As if in answer, each strand of long black hair disconnects and falls to the ground, content to wither away instead of remain in a state of unending misery. 

As my hair that is no longer my hair ejects from its lifelong confinement, I find myself unable to breathe. My throat expands to match the breadth of my shoulders; it is nothing but a paradoxical physical mirage and the adjunct antithesis of the inevitable and continuous constriction of my airway. I endure all of this passively, incapable of interference. Reality has abandoned me to the sufferings of a poisoned mind, once so full of promise and possibilities, now a shriveled heap of brain matter slowly constricted by a concaving skull.

My pupils expand, gathering the mass around them until they surpass my irises, swallowing first my nose, my head, and then all of my existence. 

 Everything is dark. For the first time, everything is quiet. My soul takes one last personified breath and dissolves into the sweet promise of nothingness.