Cracked Nailpolish

It occurs to me, in times like this, that I’m “inside”. After the death squads have rolled through and all the common humanity has departed by force or flight, it’s us who step in, born far behind the line, shackled to the invisible hand at the bottom of the innermost land’s treasury. The house still bears the marks of habitation, patterns I don’t obey scarred into the wood, marks of footsteps made daily, furniture scraped and dented, memories floating like a bad fog I have to dispel to bring myself to bearings every morning. 

Regardless of ghosts, it all feels eerily empty. I plug my laptop into a ground level outlet of the second floor, spending most of my time, one chair, one table, no furniture except a window open to the sea. The paint peels faster, the wood buckles more and more in the night with no one around, the shore’s walkways devoid of any life, seabreeze coming in bright like chalcone for the few times when I take my gander along it, locked down, empty, only the barest comforts priced in by the ones I came behind, coca-cola and some sharpies to huff on as the waves crash, unimpeded by the usual fluttering of yachts and fishermen.

I sometimes wonder if my saliva is caustic or septic - either way, I know it’s poison. Into my thirties, I’m still a virgin, unmarried, undated, yet my reputation and thoughts precede me. I’m occupied constantly with arborescent explosions of tangential thoughts upon thoughts, my mind taking the violent and the sexual and running with it down every avenue presented. I don’t wear makeup, I keep my hair cropped into a pixiecut, my nails crack and splinter to dyke-lengths any attempts to polish them chips off within days. My vagina is stretched open, a sucking vacuum, whore’s emptiness, a black hole worthy of the wickedest temptresses.

I’m immune to the cold. When I dream, my thoughts generate the intense foggy humidity of the deep summer. It always feels like some form of plague season, the dreamy miasma of August or the blizzard’s hangover of grey skies and frozen snowmelt of March, the frozen mud and grey skies of November. Sometimes I’m reminded that I exist, though the more i try to remind myself, the less I know it. I noclip in public, a gazing point floating through space, five feet, seven inches above the ground, my body more absent than even the usual alienation.

It feels like home. As much shame as it is to admit to the readers, the open-air sepulcher of the town afterwards is all I know. Open spaces terrify and confuse me, people baffling and strange to my eyes. Without golems, without strange anatomies, the world is as I knew it my entire life - dead trees, empty houses, shivering breeze and foggy humidity, nobody home, nothing around, no life, left on Earth.