Ashleigh Genus

I think my brain has broken — mind, too strange to understand. My dearest one exception befound her final land; here still, I am alien among mortals. 

Who knows where my soul will go?

I don’t believe in gods anymore. 

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The closest It comes to understanding is through characters, penned in novels, easily observed on mobile tomes. She buries herself in their words for reconnaissance — on her origins, on her end. This year, her goal was 40; she has completed 205. She has come no closer to reading her inner self. 

Other times, It thinks in terms of disgust. Which shade of revulsion shall she embody today? Testing the waters of her humanity through small talk in the elevator. Without fail, this feels wrong every time. There is fur on her tongue, maybe a feather, possibly fuzz, but she cannot remove it. So she forms her words around its plumy shape.

Later, It ruminates as she sits at her desk. When people cover their noses, she wonders at the stink of her scent. Can they sense she is other? Latermore, she finds herself covering her own nose. She is reminded of human nature, strange as it may seem. Perhaps she isn’t as grotesque as It believes her to be.

On the sidewalk she feels stares trail along her skin, paths mapped by eyes hard like beads. Censured to walk, to expose her skin to the sun. It repeats, “this should make you happy.” Still, in the mirror, her face is contorted with pain, streaked with tears, every bit as normal as she’s known. People call her bubbly. What do they know?

Joy is hard to place. Has been habitually, unreliably, wound. Nights are strings the color of ink — laced across crowded rooms or loud spaces. Secured beneath cross-stitched tints of lilac: sensory indulgence, titian: avoidance, and verdigris: unguarded desire. After which, the bobbin is bare. It must find her way home.

It leads, she follows, a husk of a girl. Alongside sanitation workers, trailing the tails of dawn, their tracks as routine as her own. It found no presence as dependable — as threatening to those who would dare. 

There is no god in liminal phases of day. 

There is no intangible other to trust.

·

Far later in time, she grows aware; her threats contour other molds. Sublunary souls are not the shadows in this secular sphere. It haunts her.

She considers the cycle a sort of cerebral curse; little white pills and blaring reminders to tame It, to make It hers. She leads. It follows.

The very trucks that once kept her sound, lead the charge of midnight churning — regurgitating waste along a route that trails beneath her poorly sealed window. Each night, they wake her sleeping bones, pulling her from dreamscapes like lightning struck consciousness.

Open-eyed, she thinks, despises, recollects once adoring these men. Though her dreams may be nightmares, they remain a safe haven from the disquiet of the waking world. 

She waits, counts, breathes, but fails to fall. Instead, facing a new morning — no closer to reconciliation with this segmented sense. It is within, or she is without. Again. She’ll try again. 

Is silence an eventual possibility? Is sanity? She preserves a fraying, roseate thread of hope.