you've got a minute left to fall in love

fade IN: this is not my room. this is my room. this rickety old mansion is a house that became my home, but in past weeks I've fantasized more than I care to admit of striking a match and holding it to a beam in the attic. she's a proud painted lady, 113 years old and originally bedecked in a perfect shade of "it's a girl!" pink that has these days faded to a noncommittal pastel salmon. I live here with 3 boys, a girl, a feline and an undertermined amount of ghosts who toy with us playfully on a regular basis. I'm fairly sure that they must have been writers, too, because the otherworldly and inexplicable noises are almost always what sounds like the whooshing turning pages of a gigantic encyclopedia, or typewriter keys pinging faintly from the crawl spaces.  

today, I am lying in a bed that I've made but can't get out of, quite literally and factually doomed to an immediate future (at least) of romantic peril and sticky, sticky living situations. I'm wearing a black lace slip, a hoodie that bears a faint tincture of pad thai, and some sleep smeared eyeliner. the only music I hear is of the urban concerto below on fell street, trucks rattling toward the sea and people at the gas station dutifully filling 'er up, percussed steadily by my cat's suspicious thumping tail. it's ten in the fucking morning and all I want to do is sleep but my anxiety is in the ranks of 24 hour party people and you can't call the cops on a panic attack. my whole body feels slack from exhaustion but I shot up from a nightmare around 7, wild eyed as a hunted fawn looking down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun and slumber is as of yet still an impossibility. it's too cold to leave the down comforter to scavenge for food so I survey my options. a picked-over bowl of jellybeans with only the gross flavors left, or a warm newcastle that someone let fall by the wayside during a particularly wild and exciting rock band tourney on saturday. I look back at the beans and then opt for the beer, telling my cat to shut up as I reach for the opener, don't look at me like that, but he continues to stare, tail thumping all the while.  

the beer tastes surprisingly refreshing. (can I readily admit that? I suppose that I can.) this year has been a curveball if anything, with all of the twists and turns being plentiful and each one seemingly more consequential than the next. I'm getting by. the other night jon and I laid in bed and he looked at me straight on for the first time in weeks, comfortingly shrouded in night time, and put a hand on my cheek. he paused thoughtfully and said, "your eyes give you away." I'd started to scoff or do something to predictably ruin the moment and he continued, "no, really. they look so incredibly sad, sometimes. you can be smiling bright enough to light up the whole room and your eyes will stay so sad." I didn't answer.  

he asked, "why?"  

I said, "I don't know. why does it bother you?"  

up until that moment in my life I had never once considered myself mysterious. mystifyingly chemically imbalanced, perhaps, but not puzzling. I have become someone's rubix cube, someone's enigma soaked riddle, and somewhere along the line I became a woman.