The Last Day in This Temporary Place

6 1 1

by EPrescott

by EPrescott

Featured in the Crimson & Clover Anthology

Thank you for fizzywritings for the event

There's a spot on your lips you've been picking at with your teeth and your fingertips for the past few days. It hurts when it's dry. Hurts even more when you lick at it—like a swollen bruise you can't peel off. The stubborn piece of skin hangs on, persisting the way the smell of night rain and melted ice clings to these late winter mornings, where the sky's a sunny overcasted shade. Sometimes it aches, to the silent ticking of a clock, counting down on the remaining days until you're free from this sad prison you've chosen for yourself.

On the last day in this temporary place, you wash the sheets and unplug the monitor, clean the tub and the kitchen, empty out the shelves and cabinets, and take out the trash. Outside, the pitter-patter of water drips over the overhang. The parking lot across the street has cleared up—black ice glistened across wide black asphalt patches. Your life is boxed into cardboard and suitcases, closed and zipped up, shoved against the corner of the room. The soft shadow drapes across the walls, the floorboard, lingering on the makeshift plastic pot you made for your long-wilted green onion. The poor plants' roots have rotted away, waterlogged and weakened.

Your parents will arrive to pick you up soon. Perhaps, you should feel joy. Nonetheless, all you can muster up is the tightening of your gut and squeezing of your throat. A quiet defeat. A nonexistent triumph over nothing. The tender tendril of thrill vanished, leaving only behind a foul aftertaste.

You're restless, raw and eager. It feels as if someone, or something, is dying—gasping on its last breath, clutching its heart in final desperation. And, you can only helplessly let it be, watching early spring brings a part of your soul running down the window pane of your rented bedroom, draining down the sewage along with the unacknowledged misery and teething loneliness that had been eating you up inside out. Your housemates had all moved out. The house rang deafening with silence.

The stilted uneasiness pulls—anxious still—craving and crawling for another presence, another warmth, other than your own. You bite your lips again, pulling on the loose skin and pushing your tongue at the crack. Yet, time stretches on like the neighbouring house's chimney lazily exhales, its breath curling out in plum thin puffs, fading into the grey clouds dredging overhead, while you rot away, bloating and sagging under your own weight of existence. You're a mosaic of body and flesh and bone lacking eyes and ears and mouth, you're a maze of happiness and despondent trapped in a box you call a momentary home and have learned to love and loath.

On the last day in this temporary place, you wait.

And it isn't until your mum calls, We're here—it isn't until you're opening the front door and running down the driveway into the open arms of your mum and dad's—that the dying parts within your soul reignited and you became alive, once again.