Lines and curves
The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.
He runs to make a train he will never catch
to a place he will never go.
His suitcase is filled with clothes he will never wear.
He writes hundreds of letters he will never send.
The salt from his tears is never tasted
so he wonders if he ever really shed them.
He looks in the mirror and realizes that his face looks completely different
when it is inverted.
In the mirror, the edge of his mouth curves upward
but he still swears that his lips rest in a straight line across his face
unless he is smiling.
The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.
Her black dress is her happiest article of clothing.
She ties her hair back so tight
that a person looking directly at her face would argue that it did not exist
when she wants people to notice
how her curls fold neatly into one another like
fingers interlocking
or four-legged animals that sit with their paws folded underneath their bodies.
She is entirely made up of shades of gray,
her eyes only a shade darker than her skin,
her hair a shade darker than her eyes.
When you look closely,
you can tell that her lips are pink,
a pink as pale as a rosebud that is yet to bloom.
The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.
All of a sudden,
she clutches her left forearm with her right hand
and feels her nails make a pattern of white imprints in her skin.
She cannot remember ever touching something so warm.
The act of touching is different from the experience of feeling.
It is not just the direct contact of her body with the warmth,
but the contact of her body with her body,
simultaneously touching the warmth and feeling it.
And as she feels it,
she watches color travel across her skin,
winding its way amidst the gray
like watercolor paint
accidentally spilled on a gray ink wash
depicting a scene of trees that have no leaves.
The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.
The zipper of his suitcase breaks and his clothes steadily drag out
of the hole in the cheap plastic
as if they were attached to each other
like a long chain of handkerchiefs that mysteriously emerge out of a magician's sleeve.
And he does not notice the articles leaving a trail like breadcrumbs in the forest
despite the good-intentioned exclamations of polite passerby.
He chooses not to notice.
He knows what is happening but he chooses not to know
by convincing himself that the world inside his mind is more real than the world outside of it.
And therefore,
he develops control over everything he could possibly experience
in this world or out of it.
And reality stops mattering.
And all of a sudden,
the righthand corner of his mouth is a fingernail's length lower than the medial cleft of his lip.
And he can no longer choose not to notice.
The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.
And the train station is so crowded that he feels himself merge with the people around him.
Nearly losing himself to a sea of lost individuals as he melts into the noise,
a noise so loud that he cannot hear it.
The other ripples in the water step on the chain of shirts and momentarily fall out of sync with the current.
And the colors are all different,
but there is so much color that he no longer sees blue, green, or magenta
but rather he simply sees color.
And the only thing that stands out to him
and wakes him from his trance
is an utter lack of color
a figure completely devoid of pigment
except for a shade of pink that is barely recognizable as pink
but is warmer than the cool gray.
And the pink makes up a line that turns upward on the end.
And the tile on the floor of the station is blue
but he does not know that it's blue.
But he knows that her lips are pink.