Dear Phillip,
The second-to-last time I saw you, you called me "Judith" and sexually assaulted me in my own bed. But don't worry; I never told anyone. I know how much you wanted my friends to like you.
I've been well. Right now I'm trying to rid myself of my self-injuring tendency to always be moving “faster and faster and farther away”, yet I don't think I've ever been happier than I am now. I live a sort of special, quiet existence as of late. There. Now I've given you kind of an idea. And... what else? I have cherry-red hair and sleep a lot later, if I can. Today I couldn't because I got restless, so I decided I would write to you.
This letter concerns yesterday:
I had a bicycle accident on my way home. Holes in my clothes, fresh scrapes in my skin under those... And it was raining, so all the mud unloosed, stinging as it went down. And, regardless of everything else, I still thought about it---
The population of Boulder, Co. is 102,800. I suppose something like this should have been among my expectations when I chose to move here, knowing you made the same decision a whole year and a half ago.
I think up until yesterday you may have been dead. But I saw you and you even look like dirty laundry.
Phillip, was this accidental, or will I be seeing a lot of you?
If you want, when it happens, we can again feel the tiniest moment of utter panic and pretend not to recognize each other. I'm not even going to look up your address and mail this letter, if it makes you feel any better.
Before you left our city of origin, you called me by my full name, and then you called me “whore”. No one ever calls me either, and I've been mulling the truth of these things since.
J.
-C
i was iffy at the start, but there are quite a few lines near the end that i like an awful lot.
ReplyDeleteYeah... I was stoked about the first paragraph and the last line of the flash fic, but the second paragraph is admittedly filler. Except for the phrase "self-injuring tendency".
ReplyDelete