Grocery

She sat. 

She sat and contemplated how for every thing that is born, something else must first die. 

She contemplated the sheer indulgence of her current state, a soft whisper from a long ago girl that used indulgence to justify her cruelty. 

She watched light dance across the succulents— cars bobbing on to their respective nestlings. She gulped more fog than she felt she could stomach. 

How nice to be selfish. How exhilaratingly unhinged, to get in the car to go to the store and find oneself instead at the coast, gazing deeply into nothing.  These are not the actions of a kept women, a women kept within someone else— someone who loves her, who means well, but who wants her all the same. She is alone. Nobody loves her. 

How gently she can call herself names now, can define her bones without fear of someone asking to share in those definitions, share with her what she is. She does not feel like sharing. 

“No body troubles my body.”

How the waves move like the blood in her veins. Is this why she loves them so? Is this what draws her to study them for hours on end? Is it the syncopation of blood and water?

Maybe we were not made in God’s image. Maybe we were made in the Earth’s image. For don’t we humans encapsulate so beautifully all that the Earth contains?? Do we not spin and trip and grow and destroy and laugh and dance and surprise and sleep and run and falter and love... just as the Earth does? Are we not more closely matched to the hillside with it’s rocks and trees than the phantom in the sky casting rules and judgements? Do we not belong solely to the land on which we walk?

She sat. 

And she soon left. 

She belonged to no one. ​