What Keeps Her Sane

She wasn’t going to let it happen again. Not this time. She sat in the booth, took a sharp intake of breath, she couldn’t feel anything. She tried to focus but the room was spinning, it was breaking into pieces, it was cold and warm at the exact same time. Everything had always been simple and straightforward, but now, in her present state, she wasn’t certain of anything at all. Her shaking hands picked up a glass, full of water, and trembled slightly, spilling a few drops over the edge which landed on her jeans.

“Be careful, you’re drinking it too fast”, he said, reaching for the glass with a concerned look on his face. As her boyfriend, he felt a need to watch over her and protect her, especially at a time like this.

“Stop, I’m fine”, chiding him for trying to take the glass which was saving her life, keeping her sane. She stared into the blue glass of the hookah’s base, reciting and writing lines of poetry in her mind, memorizing it, so she could record it later when she returned to her room, her safe and peaceful room. They were looking at her, she could feel their eyes boring into her skin, then meeting eachother, eyebrows raised. What should she do? Continue staring into the abyss of the faux orange stucco wall, raise her eyes, create a conversation?

But how, in her present state, could she carry a conversation? Everything she said she forgot moments, even seconds later, with the exception of the torrent of words that kept surging into her mind and onto the mentally simulated paper. She just wanted to be in her room, her laptop at hand, her fingers feeling the smooth black keys. All she wanted to do was write, write her poetry. This is what kept her sane on those crazy days that she couldn’t take back, the ones that left residue in her lungs, the ones that left her hair thick with the smell of THC fumes.

And she was so pretty, in a natural beauty kind of way. Her brown hair was long and wavy on days, straight on others, and her eyes sparkled with an otherworldly force. They caught your gaze the second you looked at her face, like magnets; they pulled you in and wouldn’t let go. They didn’t even have a color, constantly changing, sometimes so green they looked like leaves imbedded in the area her iris should’ve been, sometimes a light blue similar to that of the sky on those clear, cloudless, winter days, that are so freezing yet so beautiful. Once you got over her eyes, you would let your own fall to her lips, perfectly shaped, light pink against her skin. The good thing about her appearance was how real she looked, she wasn’t perfect, but in a flawed way, she was.

But those nights made her look lost, forlorn, her lips were molded into a permanent frown, those eyes were so full of a strange sadness that you couldn’t help but feel powerless and exposed when you saw them. But she wasn’t sad, or unhappy, she was just absent of feeling. She would stare for what seemed like an eternity at the same spot on the wall, or the floor, or an object, in her mind writing those lines, but nobody else could see those pages.

Nobody could see the poems and stories she would write in her mind, like handprints of time, adjectives flying across electrons, nouns falling into nerves. This is what kept her alive, this is what kept her mind sane in those desperate times of placidity where she was capable of nothing else. This is what kept her existent in the eternity of the universe.