some story: a sense of scent.

During the day she would stay suspended in her apartment, like a rare bird perched in its cage and locked away from the expanse of the high pitched city, which could be heard but not felt. She rarely slipped out of her pocket of rest to be carried through the veins that pumped the heart of Manhattan full of life. A window was all she believed she needed to admire the colors the city’s shell had been delicately dipped in—dyes of gold, coral and jade—that bled together and dried into a color with no name.

Today her glances from the window drank the juice of the city, but gave her no satisfaction. Only in Manhattan, Claudelean sighed, would there be no horizon where the sea and sky came to kiss. This morning, her eyes were circled with nostalgia. And it was as if, her mind looked through the hole in a door and only saw shapes of her past. The vision burned her eyes and she drew the curtains in self-protection against the world that throbbed liked a wound.

Falling into the palm of her bed, she masked herself with last night’s sheets and contorted her body into a fetal position until she was lulled back to sleep. She swallowed darkness, as if it were a breath of air, and sewed her eyelids into the bedding of her skin to keep her vision centered within the dream and outside reality, which weighed heavy upon her eyes and tried to make contact with her conscience.

Claudelean consumed dreams as if they were drugs given to prisoners of distinction. There was a drug for forgetting and a drug for awareness—and she was reliant on both. She usually controlled her environments so meticulously, assuring she would never become situated in a state that surprised her or she thought she was not ready for. But today she was unsuccessful. She had woken, and before setting down to her writing, memory had splintered her leisure hour and torn right into her flesh—bruising her mood and breaking her mind into fragments of times that she was not prepared to have isolated. She did not want to think yet. She did not want to heal now. And so, she hid beneath her imagination until dreams wore off, and woke her sober to the light and obligated to the real. She knew then there would be something she needed to write—a part of her substance that the page would frame—a splitting of self, she would have to be ready for.