OPERATION: MINDCRIME, the skin

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This is what a regular post will look like. In order to stretch this out, have a garbage vingette I wrote for class on the last day of school. c':

It wasn’t always this way.

The gales are weaker in the morning than they are in the afternoon, chilled whispers no more than a prelude to Mother Nature’s violent symphony in the darker hues of the day. It whisks around your head, leaps and bounds in the air around you as it tugs on the strands of caramel hair and pushes leaves - painted pumpkin, shriveled and frayed around the edges - into the soggy air around you. With it, it carries rain, little children’s tears guided this way and that with the ever-changing breeze, and the drizzle spots freckles on the clear plastic canopied above your forehead. Streetlights glimmer through the translucent material and droplets of water clinging to it, little white hexagons dancing to the beat of the rain patter. They’d disappear in time, you know, go out when the dawn has reached its end. For now, though, between the stone sky and the infant squall, it is your only companion; you revel in its small light.

How many hours have passed this way? Storms had come and gone, the midnight mover bringing with it thunder, but through the lightning strikes and the hail pallets cascading down on your person, you are no closer to what you’d been waiting for days prior. How many minutes have passed this way? Surely, it only seemed a moment since the sun had first peeked its blazing eyes over the inky horizon - it sits low, now, cradled in a mountainous blanket over the horizon - but such a long eternity has it been since the earliest car of the day has gone streaking by, reflective Corvette screaming its greeting and farewell in only a matter of seconds. How many days have passed this way? Waiting - waiting.

The trees weep orange, dead arms unable to support the weight. Is that, you wonder lethargically as you watch the leaves apply themselves with adhesive to your wet umbrella, what you were to him? Dead weight left to petter off and die?

It wasn’t always this way. You used to spend mornings wrapped in his arms, legs tangled in blankets and his breath tumbling warmth over your skin. But now - oh, now - you spend your mornings on the rainy corner of Astor and Lafayette, alone save for the leaves and the rain and the umbrella with his initials carved into the base. Wait for me, Mary, Nikki had said. Wait for me, and I’ll come back for you. He’s not here now, you know, but you can hear his sugar cane words on the breeze, audible only to you like the high pitched noises that only a canine could listen to. You hear him so clearly.

I’m waiting, Nikki. I’m waiting here for you.

A second car streaks past, sending grounded water airborne, and as the pasty-colored Suburban disappears over the horizon, you realize:

You are so tired of waiting.