+ another happy new year +

"She sits cross-legged on the carpet, surrounded by Technicolor reminders of everything she wasn’t. Her fingers are still wrapped around the scissors, blades half apart, hovering above glossy pages of cheekbones and couture. She doesn’t know why she still does it, this ritual. Maybe it’s about taking something beautiful, or trying to make something else beautiful, or even attacking something beautiful with too-small fabric scissors. Either way it happens at least once a month when the postbox is stuffed with interviews and photographs and articles of things that don’t matter, really, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe that’s why she does it. To separate the pictures she treasures from cluttered paragraphs about heels and surgery and film sets that don’t do anything to make the world a better place. All they do is distract everyone from what a not-better place the world is becoming.

And yet her walls are still covered in clippings. Bits and pieces from yesterday, last month, last year that illustrate a timeline of obsessions and infatuations. It’s intriguingly pathetic, or perhaps pathetically intriguing.

She doesn’t get up, even though her knees start to hurt. She’s been wearing the same sweatpants for the last four days. Her hair is still wet from the shower, dampening the back of a shirt that used to smell like fabric softener, but now only smells like shampoo and soap and girl. She wants nothing more than to sit on the floor, with these scissors and sweatpants, but at the same time she yearns for more, for everything more. For somewhere so different that even she is unrecognizable. To trudge through snow in scuffed boots, to navigate an endless labyrinth of sidewalks that go anywhere, to figure out if she is the same as the person who she could be. It’s doubtful.

If she were religious, she would clasp her hands and beg for guidance. She would kneel and whisper words that a million people have whispered. She would confess and wait. Instead she sits, poised above a stack of colors and faces. Instead she burns her hands and mouth and throat and breathes in the steam that wafts lazily out of her cup. Instead she listens to the same songs and allows her cheeks to become silently tear streaked. Instead she inhales the paper smell and admires the black marks that allow her to vanish for a little while, half-wishing she didn’t have to come back."