The Fifteenth Floor
Tonight, I'm letting my tears fall from the window. For five months, my home will be on the fifteenth floor. I'm pushing out the rainfall from my eyes, so they disappear into the city. For one week, I’ve been waking up when Paris is asleep. I'm twenty and I'm crying like a child.
I thought I was someone different. But sitting in this foreign apartment, trying to write something worth reading, I'm meeting the parallel writer.
She is a vacant frame. Her words read exhaustively. She's scared to chip at her surface and mark her language with warm blood. She's staring at a landscape of skyscrapers illuminated by windows of individual lives. If she were not biting her hand, clenching her jaw on raw skin till she screams, she would write about her fascination with the silhouettes that pass by window frames. She's paced the floor for an hour, shrunk in her bed for another. She's alone.
Before my flight to Paris last week, I began to mourn the absence of my mother. In this city, the only mother I know is the one I must be for myself. I dwindle into fetal position and glide my hand against my forehead wishing to sweep all the unease from my brain.
The word "home" is ambiguous. It's not a building I miss, it's the tile leading to my family in the living room. It's holding my dog after he sunbathes on the porch. It's the sense of homeliness woven in my partner's clothes. It's the sacred conversations shared on long drives through vast highway jungles with my best friend. Apart from my 'home, I look like an ill patient sewn to a hospital mattress, clothed in tears for the feeling of dying. But I'm not dying, it's just the inside of my stomach is a vortex of memories flushing into a homesickness that snakes through my body.
One hand is holding my breast, while my belly is pressed into my knees. Aimlessly, I stare at my notebook, listening to its empty pages mock my drooping ability to write a meaningful sentence.
My wits have run out.
The words I write are now stressful and coated in the pressure of my convulsing cognition. What I once found solace in, haunts me.
In a parallel place, my loneliness in Paris would drive me to the brink of becoming the next great American author. The city's grandeur would shape me into a cove of bustling neurons. But I miss the heat of my love and the skin that leaves poems on mine. I long for the face of reassurance; the visage that plants carnations in my soul. Yet the agitation of change is killing the flowers I've nurtured on my own. Instead, I grow sore tear ducts and thick bags beneath my drowning eyes. Anxiety pulls at my ribs like a tightening noose—breathless, I tuck myself in. The smell of wine on my unbrushed teeth lingers in the dark. I'm weak and nauseated as I suffer through the death of each of my flowers.
Before writing tonight, I believed if everything else crumbled, my writing would save me. But the duality of my house of cards, the persona you are reading from, is disintegrating into a numb ink that cannot print an impression on your soul.
My system is barren of all empathy for myself and my body sags like a wet towel. Gravity takes my tears, the ones pouring from the window on the fifteenth floor, but they evaporate before ever hitting the pavement. I give my biology, the DNA in my eyes, but I cannot give my tortured words because this sickness is sucking me dry like a tick.
Tick, tick, tick.
Hours have fled and Paris is asleep again, but I'm resting like half-dead roadkill feeling my blood thin.
If it were another day, l'd write something to affect you.
But tonight | write prose
Crafted to expose
The empty writer
I've relentlessly come to know
The only warmth in duplicity
Is the half that's enclosed
By overgrown weeds
That the parallel has sewn
Both writers coexist
To test the callus of my bones
They make me hunt for peace
That crafts poetry into a home
Published in Eclectca Magazine 2024