What is this feeling? The world around me spins as the whiteboard marker I was holding falls to the ground. Cotton muffles my ears and I don’t hear the gasps from my classmates and the carpet rushes up to meet me. The definite integral on the board lays unsolved and we’ll never know the total distance the martian spaceship traveled towards the sun.
Sleep. It’s eluded me for days. I feel each of the muscles in my body relax as I sink into the inner parts of my mind. Grayscale images of my hopes and fears flash as the wrong audio tracks do a horrible job of dubbing the video that plays over and over again…
***
I’m thrown back in time. In the basement of a building I’ve never been in before, it’s the basement of a shady diner in the 1920’s. Revealed by dim lights, the simple and well-kept furniture is draped with the bodies of people dressed lavishly enough to be regulars at the Ritz. And here I am, in my brother’s pants and vest and shirtsleeves. My hair is slicked back, the only thing giving away my true gender being the rather large bun on the back of my head. But otherwise, no one would ever know.
“Caroliena, do you want to sit in the front seat?”
What?
Someone sidles up to me, dressed to the nines. “He’s a manwhore!” the person says as they look me straight in the eye.
I’m sorry?
Someone sits at a piano, the wrong lyrics matching up with the wrong melody.
A girl with a feather in her hair and beads on her dress passes in a pair of impossibly high heels. I suddenly feel under dressed in my brother’s best church clothes. I start to perspire, though I’m not quite sure as to why. As the piano fades, sourceless music plays and fills the room.
“When I’m lookin’ in the mirror, honey you are all I see…”
I find a mirror in the back part of the room. The person reflected there is a stranger. She has my eyes, my lips, my eyebrows temporarily thickened by mascara. But the expression and the posture are all wrong. She stands, her shoulders, hips, and ankles in line, neck tall, and mouth split in a wide and real smile. Her eyes hold the secrets of the world, of happiness, of truth. Her hand moves as I move and we undo the knots on the back of our heads, smear the mascara off our eyebrows, and all of a sudden everything makes sense. But that feeling fades faster than it came on.
We tug at the waistband of our pants, the skinny jeans raising an infinitesimally small amount up our hips. We tug our sweaters into a less awkward position, adjust our scarves, and we step into a pair of worn, black sneakers. We hastily run a brush through sleep-mussed hair, wincing at the slight pain when the brush would hit a knot in our hair.
The hair seems longer now. It didn’t take this much effort before to make it decent. It seems like I laid down to take a nap with boyishly short hair, the donated hair being freshly cropped off, and I woke up to go see a movie with shoulder length hair. Where is my time?
I flip my hair over, brushing the under layers. My hair nearly touches the floor when I’m bent at ninety degrees with my neck relaxed so that I’m looking at my knees. My arms get tired – It never took this long to get to looking decent.
I flip my hair right side up again. The sun sets outside my window and there isn’t a dry eye in the room. When did I get to caring this much? What does that even mean? Is that what this is?
I slip into the house, the door left unlocked. It’s eleven-thirty and I feel electricity coursing through me. But I made an idiot of myself. I over think everything. But where does my trail of thought leave me?
I blush as I open the tupperware full of homemade cookies. They’re slightly misshapen, the chocolate chips hidden in the baked dough so that they look rather plain on the outside. The smell of sugar rises from the canister and I reach to take one. Chewy and soft, made from tough love. It isn’t my fault that the oven can’t handle it.
The front of my skinny jeans, sweater, and the scarf wrapped around my neck are splattered with flour, the dusty white easily revealed on the background of dark denim and different shades of gray. I blush as my friends around me make innuendos and I laugh with them. They share my sense of humor, though the jokes that may have been perfect for the moment die in my throat before they even get the chance to be formed. By the time my tongue gets the courage to speak, it’s too late. And the words get lost in the void that is my mind…
***
I’m vaguely aware of the soft plastic that is pressed to my face, encircling my mouth and nose in a seal of oxygen. My chest rises and falls in a steady motion, the deep breaths making the gesture seem too slow. I feel tears on my cheeks and I wonder why I care so much all of a sudden. But I release the breath that I was holding and the worries that I made a fool of myself or those over-thought thoughts start to release from my system little by little. My hair tickles my collar bone, little strands falling off of my shoulder as I inhale.
I concentrate on nothing but these small feelings. The hairs on my shoulder are velvet fingertips that raise goosebumps onto the skin there. My feet relax into a first position naturally, the toes pointing out into a thirty and a one-fifty angle, gravity acting as the most gentle hands pulling them down as far as they will with no other force. The sleepy feeling in my muscles feels like Saturday afternoon before it got complicated, the afternoon sun streaming through my window and warming my pillow. A single song plays over and over again, an unknown artist, gaining prominence as that record makes its rounds in my head; “Sign says five miles, and I feel it’s my fault this time…”
I realize that all I’m really waiting for is one thing.
I’m waiting to exhale.
—-
Title: Waiting to Exhale by Caroliena a.k.a. arol
Rating: PG to PG13
Genre: Original Fiction
Summary: Loosely based on a twisted dream mixed with bits and pieces of reality. Exaggerations and disconnection. What’s the point exactly again?
Notes: This, along with a majority of the things on my site, are written while sleep deprived, so I fully understand if things don’t make sense. Looking back, I guess that’s the point. I wanted to correctly pin down this feeling of…I guess you can say it’s anguish? There is no specific word to describe what I was thinking about while writing this, though kudos to you if you can find one that may work. But yeah, there are two references to songs that I made. Here’s the artist, the song title, and a link to a video.
Ryan Leslie – Addicted - video
Chris Cendana – Without You – video
