Lines and curves

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

He runs to make a train he will never catch

to a place he will never go.

His suitcase is filled with clothes he will never wear.

He writes hundreds of letters he will never send.

The salt from his tears is never tasted

so he wonders if he ever really shed them.

He looks in the mirror and realizes that his face looks completely different

when it is inverted.

In the mirror, the edge of his mouth curves upward

but he still swears that his lips rest in a straight line across his face

unless he is smiling.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

Her black dress is her happiest article of clothing.

She ties her hair back so tight

that a person looking directly at her face would argue that it did not exist

when she wants people to notice

how her curls fold neatly into one another like

fingers interlocking

or four-legged animals that sit with their paws folded underneath their bodies.

She is entirely made up of shades of gray,

her eyes only a shade darker than her skin,

her hair a shade darker than her eyes.

When you look closely,

you can tell that her lips are pink,

a pink as pale as a rosebud that is yet to bloom.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

All of a sudden,

she clutches her left forearm with her right hand

and feels her nails make a pattern of white imprints in her skin.

She cannot remember ever touching something so warm.

The act of touching is different from the experience of feeling.

It is not just the direct contact of her body with the warmth,

but the contact of her body with her body,

simultaneously touching the warmth and feeling it.

And as she feels it,

she watches color travel across her skin,

winding its way amidst the gray

like watercolor paint

accidentally spilled on a gray ink wash

depicting a scene of trees that have no leaves.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

The zipper of his suitcase breaks and his clothes steadily drag out

of the hole in the cheap plastic

as if they were attached to each other

like a long chain of handkerchiefs that mysteriously emerge out of a magician's sleeve.

And he does not notice the articles leaving a trail like breadcrumbs in the forest

despite the good-intentioned exclamations of polite passerby.

He chooses not to notice.

He knows what is happening but he chooses not to know

by convincing himself that the world inside his mind is more real than the world outside of it.

And therefore,

he develops control over everything he could possibly experience

in this world or out of it.

And reality stops mattering.

And all of a sudden,

the righthand corner of his mouth is a fingernail's length lower than the medial cleft of his lip.

And he can no longer choose not to notice.

The most intense pangs of loneliness are felt in crowded rooms.

And the train station is so crowded that he feels himself merge with the people around him.

Nearly losing himself to a sea of lost individuals as he melts into the noise,

a noise so loud that he cannot hear it.

The other ripples in the water step on the chain of shirts and momentarily fall out of sync with the current.

And the colors are all different,

but there is so much color that he no longer sees blue, green, or magenta

but rather he simply sees color.

And the only thing that stands out to him

and wakes him from his trance

is an utter lack of color

a figure completely devoid of pigment

except for a shade of pink that is barely recognizable as pink

but is warmer than the cool gray.

And the pink makes up a line that turns upward on the end.

And the tile on the floor of the station is blue

but he does not know that it's blue.

But he knows that her lips are pink.