The bare light bulb cast shadows
over the planes and valleys of her face as her white knuckled hands clasped
around a navy pen. Words
bled from her fingers in the same dark color as her veins, staining her paper
line after line as she turned her thoughts into permanent words. Her pale arm, nearly the same shade as
her page, was slung across her work haphazardly, guarding it with the same
calculations as her eyes. The
study carol was an old and withered wood the same color as her hair, a dark and
rich flavor of brown that caught your sight and held it, etched deeply with
names and symbols that once meant something to someone far away. In the set of her face and the curve of
her jaw, she was writing in the same grain as the wood, of places and people
that simply couldn’t stay. Her
spine was rigid, posture infallible; her mind’s way of making her appear composed
was lost on most because dark tears clung to the darker hollows of her eyes, as
if wishing to break her archetypal appearance. The sums of her small failures hung in the air like smoke
form clove cigarettes, sweet and cloying, refusing to be swept away by a light
breeze.