Heart Lika Empty Living Room

This is the feeling of lonesome, not lonely. As in, inspiring a loneliness, and not actually having the quality of being lonely. Like an empty living room, echoing with footfalls and whistling with city drafts. It's always echoed, I just sometimes fill it with enough alcoholic fumes, burly clouds of pot smoke, caffeine steam-cleans and the pink opium stink of desire to insulate the netted nooks and cobwebbed crannies. And only now have I turned to scrawling on the walls to alleviate the anxiety grown like a mold. So I write desperate and cackling, covering the wall 6 feet 4 inches up and stopping. Despite occasional insults to the neighbors upstairs, the prose is potent and battle-ready. Nested in my words, and, occasionally, the hard lines of a body, I convince myself that the room may not rattle pitifully with my solo dance routines and scenes where I play both parts.

Nor is this living and loving room a surprise to me. Schadenfreuede-seekers must look elsewhere. The creases and curves of my own heart are only now becoming more and more familiar to me. I, half-crazed with affectionate starvation and artistic narcissism, inspecting and cataloging the dust samples I find.


© Sara Gaddis 2010