She held
her grief
behind her eyes

like an ocean...

and when she
leaned forward into
the day it spilled
onto the floor

and she wiped at it
quickly with her foot
and pretended

no one had seen...

She's up late again.

It's a particular kind of sleeplessness. She paces with her eyes, looking from wall to wall as if measuring the worth of this life she's built for herself, trying to make it all add up in her head.

One bed with dirty sheets; two piles of dishes not quite ready to be moved to the sink; one pile of dirty clothes, one pile of clean, leaning towards each other; other things removed from her focal range that she doesn't care to see.

Winter light streams through the window, diffused by the oily fingerprints left on the pane as a greasy reminder of an escape attempt.

She sits back heavily on the couch, calculating. Fractions of a life combined and recombined add up to slightly more than one person and short of two. It's the opposite of claustrophobia, as if the walls are slowly becoming permiable. She wants to walk through them and into the domesticity of her neighbors' quiet saturday night lives, sit on their couch, munch on their snacks and see what's on their TV.

Her walls suddenly turned to watery, translucent glass, her eyes again pan the room looking for a stone.

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