Plagues

Trouble floats the moment you have difficulty speaking a name. It is as if you have infringed a sacred silence and you’re reduced to uttering the syllables in hushed reverential half-whispers. You scribble the letters in fogged up bathroom mirrors, draw a face in lakes in the sink. The name inhabit the drowsy seconds when your eyes flutter open in the morning and dwell in the softness of rapid blinks before you slide into the seduction of late evening sleep.

A smile follows your quickened steps, and your strides become springboards of giddy anticipations. Inside you shimmer, like the entire world is an endless street colonized with burning lampposts. It’s beguiling, not far from holding a jar of fireflies behind the blanket of midnight.

Then a primordial fear creeps in, shelling doubts and uncertainties, so determined to shake you down back into the stark embrace of cynicism.

Yet you are already consumed, ablaze in the promised exhilarations of lazy snuggles on rainy Sunday mornings.

You are gone. Drunkenly gone.