washing machine
stagnancy and getting over things
It’s all just the same. Every week is a continuous, circling cycle of wake up, go to school, tolerate the same five people who you love too much sitting at your lunch table, feel the stomach-churning stab of loneliness, spend a sweaty hour in the car because the air conditioning has decided to fuck itself up again, come home, sit at my laptop for three hours studying (not really, I’ve never studied for more than an hour straight in my life), skip dinner, lie down, and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep.
The dreams keep coming, too. Every night, without fail, I dream of being stuck in this city, in its dusted shimmering concrete and solar panels, being stuck here for ever and ever and ever, running in a hamster wheel. I dream of my parents’ funeral and wearing my best black dress and my swan-shaped silver bracelet given to me when I moved away that my mum had borrowed without asking and lost. I dream of something lying on top of me that is either a weighted blanket or one of my friends; I can’t be sure, but I hope it crushes me either way, grounds me down until I’m light enough to drift away on the wind and to someplace new.
I feel like one of those puddles of sewer water that wells up on the road in my hometown, still and stagnant and just waiting to dry into the tarred asphalt. My friends complain about the same old drama that they’ve been complaining about since last year, and my hair’s still the same length it was two years ago, and there’s that same headache that’s been there for three years — actually, wait, it’s never left.
( a little interlude: moving on is so scarily easy because she is flying right past me no matter how much i try to cling on, and i thought she would exist forever in my heart like this, but she’s changing, and it’s so odd that i want everything around me to change except for her place in my ribcage, and i feel so light now, but i still miss the longing, no matter how much it had hurt. )
Haven’t I waited long enough? I bounce my legs and just sit there, watching everything just go over and over and over and never come to a shuddering halt, never go backwards, only constantly spinning. Everything smells faintly like fresh laundry, but not quite clean. There’s always the residue spilling over from the last cycle.