erratic symptoms

word cluster:

[mucus, coalesce, felt-tip, grainy, desperate, lethargic, violent, violet, ambivalent]

if loving cannot be helped? subconsciously she had an affinity for men whose names began with J - especially Jared, Jason, Jacob, James. they would of course have to have hazel eyes; they would of course have to have hairlines perfectly intact.

Emmaline made tiny gashes in the leg with the side of a pushpin out of desperate boredom. halfway down the shin, directly into the ankle, in the mockery of a shell's curve. each a contrived, jagged reminder of the smell of winter wind coming east to a lonely person. winters under the trees neatly glazed with ice, the cheery blinding sun peeking up over the library. the heady crunch of salt under thick boot heels.

she was ill in December: she spat mucus into the porcelain bowl of the sink for seven days. lethargic and bleary, she went around wiping her nose on her sleeve, curling into deep library cushions to read endless tragic love narratives.

In January, just after the holiday, she met Jacob. He had a very solemn peach colored mouth and a stern way of holding his back straight. he wrote her a note on a yellow slip of legal paper with a blue, felt-tip pen. she watched him write it - his remarkably defined wrist, hairless and tanned. of course his hazel eyes. he appeared grainy though the snow like a poorly developed photograph, moving slowly, and from so far away.

(loving of course being not so easily helped). he bought her a bunch of violets. she sneered, he became petulant - then violent. smashing a vase against his own kitchen sink. she tried to feign a mask of neutrality but her eyes sparked, ribs tensed, ambivalence curled inside her.

in March, the snow began melting, and Emmaline was happy, looking at the hazy rise of the sun over the library at dawn. Jacob called her, kissed her back, touched the tender spot on her shin where she'd bruised from so many cuts with the clear tiny pushpin. somewhere on a path in the woods, they touched elbows, and coalesced.

subconsciously and loving, Emmaline helped herself. she leant back into his arms and started into the blank, misty sky. behind her his chest was breathing: moving: in and out and in